Writing content is all about giving useful information to your audience to generate more leads and sales.

Regularly publishing content on your website or social media isn’t always about search engine optimization (SEO), however, SEO does play an important role in getting you targeted traffic.

Traffic in itself doesn’t mean anything.

You can get thousands of visitors to your website but if these visitors don’t understand what you’re trying to sell, or if your writing doesn’t convince them into becoming your paying customers and clients, your SEO doesn’t help you.

Why is it important to understand your audience for better content?

It is like this: to have a meaningful conversation with someone, you need to know that person. You need to know his or her likes and dislikes, preferences and interests.

Even if you don’t intimately know the person, at least you need to have a common ground for effective communication.

It also goes without saying that you both should be able to understand the language being used.

In terms of selling your service, it is also important to know what the other person is looking for and whether he or she actually needs what you are selling or, does he or she even know that they need what you are selling?

This is why there are different content requirements for different phases of a sales funnel.

You may create content for someone who

• Is looking for what you can offer,
• Wants to do business with you but hasn’t yet made up their mind,
• Isn’t aware that they need your service  to solve their problem,
• Doesn’t know that they  have a problem that can be solved by you

There can be many such categorizations for which you need to create exclusive content.

To be able to hire my content creation services, you first need to know that you need quality content and for that, you need a professional content creation service.

What if you don’t know the importance of quality content?

Here’s what what you are losing by not having quality content for your website and social media.

If you have  poor search engine rankings, I can tell you that maybe it is because of the inferior quality of your content.

If you are getting traffic to your site but are not generating much business, maybe I can tell you that it has got something do with your content.

Why is it important to understand your audience before you start creating content for your website?

For saving money and time.

Above all, for generating more business.

Content can be high-quality and still it may not get you business.

Sometimes when your search engine rankings are improving, when you are getting lots of attention on social media, you think that you are doing great.

Maybe in terms of generating traffic you ARE doing great.

However, maybe you are creating for an audience who, although, they like your content, they’re not interested in doing business with you.

If you keep on creating and publishing content for an audience who likes your content but doesn’t want to do business with you, all your effort and investment will be wasted.

On the other hand, through your content, you need to target an audience that likes your content but ALSO wants to do business with you.

So, if you know what sort of audience you want to attract and what sort of audience you don’t want to attract, you will put all your effort and money into creating and publishing lots of targeted content for that specific audience.

How to understand your audience for better content creation?

There are many ways.

Here is a nice post on Search Engine Journal on what various things you can do to understand your audience better to be able to generate epic content.

There is a reason big businesses spend millions of dollars on research companies (remember the controversial Cambridge Analytica company?).

Bigger companies spending millions of dollars doesn’t mean smaller businesses cannot use methods and tools to better understand their audiences. These are some things you can do:

Put yourself in their shoes

Evaluate your content from their point of view.

If you were looking for your service, what would you try to find?

Suppose you are promoting a running shoe.

Think from the point of view of the person who is having difficulties with shoes that are either falling apart, slowing them down, or just flat out uncomfortable.

Also think from the perspective of a person who may have already tried many shoe manufacturers and is looking for better or more suitable options.

You can further narrow down to someone who likes to be able to run on roads, trails, or in parks, and may also like to occasionally compete in triathlons, ultra marathons, or even a local charity 10k without having to constantly switch shoes.

Then there is a whole, bigger market of people who are not aware of how important it is to use the right shoes for running/training.

Targeted content creation can be done for all these individual audiences if you are able to understand what they are really looking for.

Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics

A tool like Google Analytics can tell you what sort of people convert and what sort of people don’t convert.

If you are promoting your links on social media and social networking profiles there also you can generate unique links to track how much traffic they are generating and from that traffic, how much business you are generating.

Observe which keywords and search terms on search engines improve your conversion rate and which pieces of content are ranking well for these keywords and search terms.

This isn’t something that you will be able to achieve in a few days. It may even take a few months to gather enough data from which some usable intelligence can be drawn.

The trick is, understanding the nature of queries and incoming traffic that gets you more business and then writing more content to cater to that audience.

Creating personas when creating content

Personas can be very helpful.

A persona is a complete or an almost complete profile of your ideal customer.

Understanding your audience and then writing content accordingly doesn’t always mean just creating for your customers.

Although, eventually, every person you target should become your customer or client, but through your content creation, you don’t always have to target people who are ready to do business with you.

You can also create content for someone who isn’t aware of the fact that he or she may need your service.

Suppose you have just launched a website and you think that once you start getting traffic from search engines, your business will grow in leaps and bounds.

You have prepared a list of keywords and search terms and then you have started creating content to target those keywords and search terms.

You are generating traffic but the business isn’t growing.

The next best thing you know is, investing in PPC advertising.

You realize that the ROI is quite low and you are spending more money than you are making.

Even Facebook and Instagram campaigns are not working.

You are in your mid-30s. You have a great business idea. You know there is a great market for what you are trying to promote.

But, why aren’t people buying? Even when they come to your website.

So, I have this persona of a person like you who is feeling frustrated and has no idea what to do.

I know the solution is targeted content.

But you don’t know.

So, I start creating content that educates you.

When I write content that educates you, I am mindful of the fact that I’m writing content for you – someone who has a business that can do well with content creation.

I’m not targeting people who want to learn content writing and then become content writers.

I’m not saying that I’m not going to attract such people, but my main target are people who don’t want to become content writers but who need professional content creation services to improve their search engine rankings as well as conversion rate.

Concluding remarks on understanding your audience for better content creation

There are many other ways you can gather intelligence on your audience and then write content that is purposeful.

You can ask questions to your visitors. You can conduct a survey. You can also ask your friends and followers on your social media pages.

The basic idea of this blog post is not to tell you how to understand your audience, the basic idea is, it is very important to think about who your target audience is before you spend your time and money on content creation.

Don’t publish what you want. Publish what your target audience is looking for.