How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects

 

How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll understand:

• How to define your target audience and understand your target market to create a clear picture of exactly who you are (and aren’t) writing for.

• Pick up tips, tactics, and strategies for gathering audience data.

• Use your improved knowledge of your audience to create content that connects with their needs and interests.

Be sure to download the free audience survey and audience persona templates. These items will help you apply the knowledge you’ll gain in this post.

Why Define Your Target Audience?

Content marketers often apply "the Field of Dreams" approach to their work.

It's true that great content tends to naturally attract an audience. It does not, however, guarantee that it will be the best audience for your brand. That means visitors that are likely to:

• Connect your content to your product.

• Buy your product because of your content.

Defining who your real audience is will help you focus not only on creating great content but on creating the right content. It makes it easier to create content that establishes you as an authority in your industry, rather than creating content for its own sake.

How To Understand Your Target Market

Start by asking yourself some simple questions. These can include:

• What problems does my company's product or service solve? If you've been in business for any length of time, you should have some understanding of why your product or service exists. Your content should be related to that purpose, too (that means resisting the urge to share irrelevant memes just because they're funny—if it's not connected to your mission, it doesn't belong in your content marketing).

• Who are our current customers? If you're not sure who buys your product or service, someone in your organization almost certainly does. Consider asking your company's executives or sales teams for this information. It may also be necessary to segment your types of customers. For example, you may categorize customers based on location, budget, or needs. HubSpot has created a fantastic introductory guide to this process.

• Who is my competition? It's likely you know who your obvious competitors are. However, some quick searches on Google and social media (particularly on Facebook and Twitter) can often reveal upstart competition you may not have been aware of. Try searching a keyword or two that are related to your industry. See which businesses come up. Browse their "About Us" pages and feature descriptions. This is an easy way to develop an idea of who your competition is and fast.

• What do customers stand to gain from choosing us (instead of a competitor)? What features do you offer that no one else does? Is there something you can do better than anyone else?

By the time you've answered these questions, you'll have defined an understanding for each of the following:

• Why your content deserves to exist.

• Who is going to read it.

• What your competition is doing (and how you can do it better).

• Why your audience should choose your content (and product) instead of your competition.

This isn't intended to be a deep, detailed process. Consider this a simple starting point.

Creating Your Target Audience Definition

Before you can create content that resonates, it helps to know your intended audience (as well as who they are not). An audience definition should ideally connect these three things:

• Your product or service

• Your main audience demographic

• Your content's mission

Here is what a simple audience definition could look like once you're finished analyzing your audience:

"[INSERT YOUR BRAND] creates content to help and inform [INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC] so they can [INSERT ACTION] better."

The Method CoSchedule Uses To Create The Right Content For The Right Audience

Let's take a look at two additional methods we use here at CoSchedule for understanding our own target audience. We're pretty zealous about understanding our audience because we want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to help our readers.

We look at it in two ways:

1. As we build our product, we want to make sure that we build features our customers will actually use. This requires that we understand their problems and frustrations, particularly ones that we can solve.

2. As we create content, we want to make sure that we create content that our audience will truly find useful. We don't just want clicks, shares, and page views. Rather, we strive to be a trusted resource readers can count on.

To accomplish these goals, we need to understand our target audience. It's as simple as that.

How do we go about it? First, we find our content core.

Finding Your Content Core

The purpose of the content core exercise is to understand the difference between what you do, and what you need to talk about.

One of the big mistakes that early content marketers make is to talk about themselves and their product, rather than the things that their users really care about. This is a huge misunderstanding of what it means to find your target audience.

Of course, your product is helpful to your customers, but that doesn't mean that it will also be helpful to your blog audience, that group of potential customers is probably interested in a much greater variety of topics.

Visually, the content core looks something like this:

At the center of your content is what you do. At CoSchedule, we make editorial calendar software, so this is a combination of social media and content scheduling topics. For our customers, we solve problems such as:

• Providing a single interface for planning and executing content marketing efforts.

• Displaying an upcoming publishing schedule on a visualized monthly calendar.

• Allowing users to reschedule content via simple drag-and-drop.

• Facilitating team communication and an effective workflow.

• Providing a tool that helps them save time and grow their blog traffic.

These are things we should certainly write about on our blog. However, it's not all we write about. We also spend our time writing about the ideas that surround these topics. This is the big idea behind "expanding our content core."

As we move away (ever so slightly) from our content core and focus on what our target audience really wants to hear about, we improve the effectiveness of our content marketing and better focus in on our target audience's needs.

At the same time, this method will also help us keep the topics we are writing about connected to our true topical focus.

At CoSchedule, this brings us to topics around how to plan, organize, and execute all things content marketing.

These topics tackle the problems that our product already addresses, but in a way that is specifically geared for what our target audience cares about. The question is: What do your readers really care about? There are several easy ways to find out.

Tactics To Find Your Target Audience

Before CoSchedule ever launched, we began trying to understand who our target audience was. Here are some of the tools and tactics we continue to use to keep our understanding sharp.

 Create Reader Personas

In an early planning meeting, we came up with a few Lean UX-type user personas that were designed to help us solve problems our CoSchedule users actually needed to solve.

This was conducted as a team exercise and was tremendously useful in our process. Looking back, we weren't always right about what our users cared about, but it was a solid place to build from.

These reader personas seek to document the real motivations and curiosities that empower your readers. By identifying them, you'll be able to find your target audience better when the time comes.

An audience persona is the first step to visualizing your audience as you write. When you picture an individual, you can properly tailor your content to them.

When you follow this type of writing process, the person reading your content will often feel like you are speaking directly to them.

Here's what you need to know:

A great audience persona covers these details:

• Who

• What

• When

• Where

• Why

Specific details are necessary for every aspect. When possible, include things like:

• Gender

• Personality

• Family life

• Job title

• Job function

• Employer

• Location

• Income

• Needs

• Pain points

• Challenges

7 SIMPLE WAYS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE

 We’re creating more and more demanding websites, with more and more assets.

Now more than ever we need to make our sites blazing fast on desktop and on mobile.

Fortunately there are some simple steps that we can take to achieve this…

1) OPTIMIZE IMAGES

This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many people fail to optimize their images.

What’s more, there’s a huge difference between using a medium sized image, and a fully optimized image.

Image optimization doesn’t just reduce the image size, it remove certain extraneous meta-data, such as when the image was created, what camera took it, and so on.

There are plenty of tools that can do this for you, such as JPEGmini, Yahoo! Smush.it and ImageOptim.

2) ACTIVATE GZIP COMPRESSION

Just activating Gzip compression can save up to 50% on load time. We all know that when we compress files on our local machine these become smaller and that is exactly what Gzip does it compresses your files before sending them to the browser this means the browser has less to load and will render the webpage much faster than when you are not using Gzip compression.

Most websites nowadays have this activated because of their large files and activating it is not really that hard.

First you need to find your website’s .htaccess and assuming your server is running on Apache just paste this on the file:

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

This small amount of code will greatly improve the performance of your site.

3) MINIFY YOUR FILES

Thanks to tools like Codekit, Prepos and CLI tools like Grunt this is becoming more common, but it’s still something you should remember to do when you finish your project.

4) CONCATENATE ALL YOUR CSS AND JAVASCRIPT

If you are using plugins, frameworks or anything external to your website the most likely scenario is that you have more than one or two files of JavaScript and CSS. That means the browser will have to get those two files which is wasteful seeing that you can concatenate all the CSS files into one file and all the JavaScript files into another this way making sure there are no wasteful HTTP requests.

This process is even painless using tools like Gulp or Grunt to do all the heavy lifting for you.

5) USE SPRITES

One thing that uses a huge number of wasteful HTTP requests is images, you have sometimes dozens of images for one page which results in dozens of HTTP requests. You could simply turn them into a simple sprite sheet and only load that once, then just change the CSS background position on every element to show the correct image.

There are also tools that help you create these sprites like CSS Sprite Generator and Stitches

6) USE A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN)

Major websites always have their static files, like images or text, on CDNs because it makes their websites load files faster.

Even if your website isn’t big enough for this, you should still load external CSS and JavaScript from CDNs where possible.

If for example you are using Bootstrap or jQuery you can get both these files from CDNs instead of hosting them yourself.

7) USE CACHING

If a file has been downloaded, why download it again?

Setting up caching is somewhat similar to setting up Gzip compression, it all happens in the .htaccess file and all you need is:

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
ExpiresActive On

# Expires after 2 Weeks
<filesMatch ".(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=1209600"
</filesMatch>

# Expires after 1 day
<filesMatch ".(css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400"
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>

Using mod_headers you can set the type of files and how long you want them to be usable for in seconds.

CONCLUSION

Website optimization is very important and following these steps will ensure that your website is delivered as fast as possible, whether over wifi or 3G.

10 WAYS TO AVOID BECOMING A COMMODITY FREELANCER

 OldCo is a well-established company that uses only freelancers to maintain a website that drives 35% of all its revenue. Whenever the current workload exceeds capacity, it hires a few more freelancers. Work begins, and all of a sudden priorities change. The freelancers are dropped and are told they will be contacted again once the company figures out what’s best for the business.

Sound familiar, right? Do you hate having your time wasted? Do you feel like your client only cares about what you can do for them? Are your skills treated like a commodity?

Here are some ways to fix that.

1. STOP BEING READILY AVAILABLE

You want to make your client happy, so you make yourself available all the time, whether it’s 8:00 am or 9:00 pm. This makes them respect you and your time less. Set the expectation that you will communicate with them during normal business hours. You have a life of your own, too. Don’t bend over backwards for them. Otherwise, you’ll be expected to always do this.

2. STOP COMPROMISING ON PRICE

Your client is trying to cut costs and asks you to reduce your rate from, say, $125 to $90 an hour. The rationale is that you’ve been doing business together for a while, so they should get a discount. But what’s to stop them from finding another freelancer who will work for $60 or $50 an hour? Don’t do it, or else you will send them a signal that you’re a commodity. Compete on quality, not price. If your client really wants to pay less, then scope down the project instead — so, less pay, but less work, too.

3. STOP DOING PROPOSALS FOR FREE

Proposals are time-consuming. You have to spend hours understanding the client’s business goals and detailing how you will accomplish them in the proposal. Clients often don’t know what project to work on next. They’ll have you create a proposal just to see the pricing, and then decide whether it’s worth the return on investment. This is really unfair to you because the client doesn’t understand the time you’ve put in.

4. STOP DOING ANYTHING FOR FREE

Clients will try to maximize your output. All they need you to do is add a ‘Like’ button? Integrating it will take only 30 minutes, so you do it for free. Trust me, they won’t ask this only once, and the time will add up. They will keep expecting this from you and will not value your time.

5. STOP CARING ONLY ABOUT THE MONEY

When you care only about the money, you don’t care about the client or project. In turn, the client will only care about the project, too. They will think they can hire any freelancer to do the same thing. Demonstrate the value that you will be providing. Let them know how you plan to put their business on a positive trajectory. Make sure they understand why you are the best person to accomplish this.

6. STOP DOING EVERYTHING CLIENTS ASK

Turning down work might feel unnatural, but a client will make a lot of feature requests, many of them useless. They will assume you will just do anything they say. You need to understand how each feature relates to their business. Force them to explain it. Ask them how they know that users want it, and if they don’t, then encourage them to drop it. Doing this will create a better product and will show that you care about their business.

7. STOP LETTING CLIENTS LEAD USELESS MEETINGS

They will want you to join meetings — meetings that don’t have an agenda, meetings that are scheduled for an hour, weekly update meetings. They will waste your time. It will send a signal that you are willing to be a part of their corporate and inefficient work culture. Call a meeting on your terms, and let them know what resolution you want out of it. Or start billing them to attend their meetings. They will start valuing your time more.

8. STOP WAITING FOR CLIENTS TO ASK YOU FOR AN UPDATE

Proactively communicating goes a long way in establishing a relationship. It shows that you are a professional and can execute independently. Communicate at least once a week. Tell your client what you’re currently working on, what you’ll be working on next and when you expect to finish. If you have something visual to show, then show it. The more you communicate, the more they’ll trust you.

9. STOP LETTING CLIENTS PAY YOU LATER

Demand payment before beginning any work. Weekly deliverables are best. Define what you will accomplish for the week; the client would then submit payment, and then you would complete the work. Repeat for the next week. It’s a good way to show that you mean business.

10. STOP BEING JUST A FREELANCER

Freelancing is running a business. Being the best coder or designer around won’t necessarily make you a good freelancer. To be successful, you need to generate client leads, market yourself, build strong relationships, understand business needs, demonstrate your value, give accurate project estimates and deliver on what you promise. These are all things that clients take for granted. Follow these steps and position yourself as a business partner, not a commodity freelancer.

SHOULD YOU BE LEARNING TO BUILD APPS?

 Smartphones just keep getting smarter. From the features to the actual phone designs, smartphones have essentially become our first line of contact.

Think about it like this: if you have your smartphone in your pocket and you need to search the web for something, chances are you’ll just whip out your phone and type away. Not too many people would choose to walk over to a computer, boot it up, load a browser and find a response. Smartphones are just convenient and the market for them continues to increase.

One great thing about newer smartphones is their ability to have some great apps available. Let me tell you, for about 2 or 3 months, I had to use an older smartphone that couldn’t get lots of the apps I use today. I was miserable. Searching the web was tough, finding locations was a paint and overall, just being connected was a task. Getting the right app can make life easier, and being connected to that one source you need is absolutely essential.

Now, as a designers and developers we have to always think about what’s next. We’re really big on responsive design and creating mobile friendly sites because it just makes sense. Or does it? Looking at some of the statistics for mobile apps, I think we may start thinking towards a new skillset that makes us even more attractive and contributes to the betterment of different communities.

We should be learning how to create apps. We should be designing, developing and thinking of great apps to be used by over 1.5 billion people worldwide. Here’s why: 

1. MOBILE MARKETING FOR BUSINESSES

It’s a well known fact that the market for smartphones is increasing. In that, people are using their phones more for different things. We browse the Internet from our phones and find the information we need. When we found out how much the numbers were increasing for mobile browsing, we had to quickly do something to make our sites viewable on different devices. Some turned to mobile sites where you created a completely different site specifically for mobile phones. While others turned to, and continue to turn to, responsive design.

At this point, if your site isn’t responsive, then you’re a bit behind. As developrs, we should always at least offer the idea of making websites viewable almost everywhere. But what happens when a site is not enough? What happens when you have something to offer that updates all the time or can be extremely useful when necessary? What’s the next step up?

The next step is to build an app. Why? Because 84% of consumers prefer to use a company’s app for routine inquiries. Also, the usage of apps is steadily increasing. This is what consumers want. And business are responding by increasing their mobile marketing efforts and, thusly, their budgets. Being able to offer not just a website, but a constant connection to potential buyers is big for business.

2. CONVENIENCE AND TRUST

You could be interested in developing an app to promote yourself, your client or a specific need you think should be addressed. Either way, the greatest thing about creating apps is the convenience it offers. There’s a different experience in waiting for a web page to load as opposed to waiting for an app to load. It never goes away, isn’t subject to browser compatibility, and is often a place where information is remembered.

When an app is downloaded to a phone, there are certain trusts the security features are allowing. In the same vein, when a customer downloads your app, there is a certain level of trust they are showing. It’s up to you to figure out how you handle that trust, but there’s no denying the fact that you are always connected to the customer.

They can get updates and alerts sent directly to their phone. They may be able to make purchases directly from their phone. The connection has the opportunity to create a deeper relationship, one that makes the consumer a believer in your brand. Always be aware of how you handle this, because no one wants to constantly be updated with marketing ploys. But they will be interested in things genuinely useful.

3. MONEY

I’m not saying creating apps is a cash cow. I’m not telling you this is your path to a six figure income. Not unless you make a game that goes viral, that is. What I am telling you, is the money made by selling apps is real. To put it in perspective, iTunes has given out over $5 billion to developers. And Google Play has over 400,000 registered user accounts that are hooked up to credit cards. I’m sure if you have a niche app, there’s some money to be made for you.

As freelancers and entrepreneurs, we’re probably always looking for a way to get another stream of income. If you have enough front money, a great idea and can round up a great team, the development of a decent app won’t take long. With some solid promotion and backers, you can easily make a nice amount of (passive) money if successful.

It’s easy to sign up as a developer. To become an Apple developer, you can choose between iOS or the Mac Developer programs, both of which are $99/year. To become an Android developer, you’ll need a Google account and the fee is $25/year.

4. PRIME TIME TO LEARN A NEW TECHNIQUE

It’s just an all around great time to learn a new technique. Things are changing and web design is no longer the end all, be all. Companies want more. Clients want more. And you should want more for yourself.

There are so many ways and places you can learn how to program and code these apps. Android has a training section that takes you through the development of a small app. And there are tons of sites online that will do the same, whether for Android or for Apple.

CONCLUSION

The biggest thing you want to make sure you do is to create an app with purpose. You don’t want to create an app just to do it and you don’t want to create an annoying one that is obviously around for one reason: to make money. As developers, we can offer up plenty ways to make apps — we see several problems a day, so create an app that finds a solution. Don’t just build an app that showcases you and your work, unless you  know that’s exactly what people want. Think about how you can begin taking advantage in the exponential growth being showcased in the mobile market. Where will you start?