How well do you really know your audience?

By Chelsea Castle: 

Our feeds are often full of many people talking about instant or easy growth, SEO tricks, and the latest marketing secrets for success. 

This kind of content is popular because we’re all tied to revenue. Pipeline pressure is real. Marketing is hard. It’s understandable we’d be tempted to try (almost) anything in this market. 

But here’s the thing. 

Content success is a long-term game. 

Winners of the long-term game recognize that not only are quick fixes and fast gains not sustainable or practical, but they also tend to degrade trust.

Companies with public trust outperform their peers by 400% (Deloitte). When we look at the greatest brands in the world, they’re brimming with stories about how they continually cultivate trust with their audience. 

Building an audience starts with trust. Building trust starts with content. 

The core ingredients to building an audience with content are simple (yet easier said than done): 

1. Mindset
2. Audience research
3. Empathy 
4. Connection

The last time I was in your inbox, I shared my LUSH mindset (the first ingredient). This week I’ll dive into ingredient two: audience research. 

“B2B is boring,” is a tired phrase that was born out of marketing that tends to be bland, impersonal, and most of all, not resonant. 

How do you change that? How do you create content that is likable, user-integrated, shareable, and human-to-human? You need to deeply know your audience. And most marketers don’t. At the very least, there is always much more to learn. 

My approach has two prongs: internal and external.

Your internal research starts with having one source of truth (most likely a spreadsheet – feel free to steal mine!) where your internal sales and CS teams can input their common woes, objections, FAQs, etc. of their own accord. You’ll also want to dump any content ideas that come up from internal meetings, call recordings, etc. 

The external work comes from your one-on-one time with customers via monthly or quarterly calls or interviews. You should also be conducting one or two surveys per year to your ICP (customers and non-customers) to better learn things like:

• What they want help with
• Where they consume content
• Who they follow/read/listen to
• What content types they like/want
• What websites do they frequent 
• Where do they go when they have a question/challenge (hint, it’s rarely Google) 
• What communities they’re part of 
• Their biggest pains at work 
• What motivates them 
• What keeps them up at night 

This is all a process of gold collection. It’s your input, and content is your output. 

At the end of the day, your audience doesn’t care about your fast-gain tricks, pipeline goals, keywords, or backlinks. They care about themselves.

It’s your job to speak to them and empathize with their problem better than anyone else. Doing that successfully starts with the right mindset and deep audience research. 🤘