No  matter how well-written or polished the content on your website is,  if it’s not covering the subject matter, your target audience is seeking, or of interest to your target audience it won’t bring visitors to your site or convert website visitors into leads.

Developing exciting content keeps your existing customers and visitors engaged and attracts new potential customers.

The primary goal of every piece of content is to be read and appreciated by as many people as possible.

You can achieve this by creating relevant content for your target audience.

If you find that you are getting stuck on coming up with content ideas, take a look at this article for assistance:  6 Tools to Help You Come up with Fresh Content Ideas

Does content need to be relevant to your audience?

Luckily, this can become rather easy if you follow these basic tips and tricks:

1. Know your audience

To start any successful marketing activity, you need to get the basics right.

Defining who your target audience is, is critical not only to content marketing but also to any other aspect of your marketing campaign.

Marketing has many facets, including social media, email marketing, PPC, SEM, SMM, native advertising and so forth, you need to know who you are talking to create a message that appeals to the target audience.

For your marketing to be successful, you need to create a buyer persona.

In short, a buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer(s) that is based on quantifiable market research and real data about your existing customers.

A buyer persona is a robust document that covers the attributes and demographics, background, motivations and goals, identifiers, hobbies and interests, challenges and everyday objections among others of your target customer.

Obviously, you don’t have to have all of these details, but the more detailed your customer persona is, and the more you know about your audience, the better.

Here is an example of a buyer persona:

A buyer persona description is very a very detailed document that dives into every element of your target audience. Often the most valuable information is in the smallest details.

For example, one of the leading challenges of Diane is the fact that she has too many responsibilities and is extremely busy with a high-stress job.

Based on her profile, we would offer content that gives tips on time management, multi-tasking or maybe an article reviewing the best solutions and software solutions to help save time, cut costs and increase the use of best practices would be of interest to this persona.

Identifying the right buyer persona is the essential step to producing relevant content for your target audience.

Take the time to develop relevant buyer personas for a complete target audience identity.  This will aid you in any other marketing activities.

2. Address their questions and concerns

After you have identified your target audience is and their persona, now you need to address their questions and concerns.

An excellent place to start is doing research, including taking the time to create a detailed list of keywords that are applicable and appeal to each buyer persona.

After you have identified the main topics, do further research through using a keyword research tool (SEMRush if one of my preferred goes to tools).

Keywords analysis is critical, and you would be wise to dive into niche markets for the most significant impact and to drive rankings.  Backlinko has written one of the best guides on how to do keyword research that will make an impact.

The Customer Service department, Service, and Business Development department should be some of your first stops when looking for customer insights. These are the people who are speaking to your existing and potential customers every day.

A quick way to interact with internal department and not impede in their work day to put together a  survey or questionnaire for each department asking for their input including what the common questions customers have or what the pain points that you can address.

You should discover that 10% of all customer service inquiries could be answered in the form of written content, short video or infographic.

To stay relevant with your content schedule and to increase customer satisfaction, content has to be timely and relevant.

Other places that are often overlooked but hold valuable information on trending topics that are relative to your audience are forums such as Reddit or Quora along with automotive forums. Also, talk with your sales, service and customer service departments.

Forums are a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its users according to topics.  Below is a screenshot from Quora:

Quora is a way to great find questions which you can turn into a substantial content piece by simply answering them.

3. Show, not tell

The future of content marketing is video, and it will dominate marketing strategies in the very near future.

According to Cisco, 69% of all consumer internet traffic by the end of 2018 will be video.

In addition to video, other visual contents such as infographics, slideshares, and branded images are among the most preferred types of content.  People are visual by nature.

Studies have shown that 65% of people are visual learners and 90% of the information coming to the human brain is visual.

As our attention span has become shorter and shorter and we expect content to be designed and structured to be skimmed through and not read.

The goal of content marketing is to ensure that your content is diverse and that your written material has visuals to refer to making the content engaging.

It is essential to show people verses telling or explaining how to do something.  This is where the art of storytelling comes into play.

People relate to and love stories.

If you browse the web, you will find a countless number of articles explain what to do but not how to do it.

Readers and visitors of your content will vary from experts to beginners, and you want to ideally appeal to both (the amateurs will one day become the experts, and you want them to have a favorable impression of your brand.

Always try to give practical examples, explain everything down to the tiniest detail or even share personal details if it can help us get the point across.  You are storytelling.

4. Trends, trends, and more trends

To stay relevant and current, it is critical to also keep up with your industry trends.

You don’t want to be producing out of date content nobody will be interested in reading.

For example, of you are in the telephone market and a new type of phone systems was released, the first thing you may want to write would be discussing the benefits, advantages and disadvantages, best features or any other aspects of the system.

You need to stay up on industry trends if you don’t rest assured, your competition will, and that’s where the forward-thinking customers will go.

A good content marketer knows that staying on top of industry trends is essential, but keeping up with other trends related to your industry essential.

The goal of content marketing is to engage your target audience and to be known as a thought leader in the market.

Everyone needs a content strategy, but maybe lost on where to start.