How to gain more customers for your business using targeted content
Love more customers for your business? Find out how targeted content can help you win them over and how to start using it.
Running your own business can be a fulfilling and profitable venture, but there are challenges you’ll need to overcome along the way. One of which is gaining more customers. It becomes an even greater challenge when you’ve already reached out to your whole network to promote your products and services.
How do you tap a wider customer base while making sure they are actually interested in your business? You don’t want to waste your time and resources on people who wouldn’t buy your products or services in the first place.
The key to your dilemma is to use targeted content in your strategic marketing objectives. Targeted content include carefully crafted messages for a designated audience. It’s also placed in specific channels to ensure that your business is connecting with the right groups of people.
Creating targeted content is one of the top 3 content marketing trends in 2022 as identified by the State of Content Marketing Report published by SEMRush
What is targeted content?
Targeted content is content made for a specific audience. It’s more personalised because you’re talking to a niche rather than the general population. More customer research and analysis also go into creating this type of content.
You have to identify your target audience and visualise them as one person. What do they look like? Where do they live? What are their likes and dislikes? If you can answer those questions, it’ll be easier for you to know what content you should be making and where you should place it.
This practice also guides you in creating content that will resonate with your audience. If you know their hobbies and interests, you can think of ways your business can capitalise on that. You’ll be able to hook them in and be curious about your products or services as well.
Three reasons why you should use targeted content
Using targeted content is advantageous for strategic growth planning. Primarily, if you have a holistic idea of who you’re creating the content for, you’re ensuring that your message will appeal to them. It’s more powerful to reach a few people who all respond to your call to action, rather than reaching thousands of people who simply ignore you.
To give more explanation, here are three reasons why using targeted content is beneficial for business growth.
1) Your executions are focused on a single direction
It’s not cost-effective or easy to pursue many different objectives, strategies, and tactics at once. This is why having one clear strategic direction is important for any business. The same principle applies to producing content executions.
Using targeted content is also a way of manifesting your strategic direction. The content you produce is aimed at a specific audience who have the potential to become valuable customers. Hence, all your efforts are concentrated on achieving that common goal.
2) Your customers can relate to you more
Targeted content can help you generate more engagement because customers will be able to relate to you.
For example, if you’re operating a food catering business, and just posting photos of your meal packages on social media for friends and family to see, it won’t stand out as much. If they’re not planning any big events at the moment, they won’t see the value of your business to them.
However, if you opt to target your content at people who do need your products or services, you’ll be able to get more inquiries and interactions. You can post about your food catering business in online communities looking for suppliers for events like weddings, corporate events, or large gatherings. You can even make your content more enticing and relatable for them, such as showing photos of your food served at actual events.
3) You can get ideal results using a limited budget
Producing content and disseminating it will incur costs. You have to conduct research, use tools, and even hire staff to execute your content strategies. Eventually, you’ll also want to boost your social media posts or website articles to get more reach and engagement.
To get your money’s worth, targeted content is the way to go. You can pool your resources into targeting a niche, so it’s easier to create content and focus on finding the platforms they regularly visit. At the same time, because the content is specifically made to connect with your audience, it will likely convert them from viewers and readers into actual customers.
Five steps to using targeted content to your advantage
Targeted content can help you find more customers when done effectively. It’s not as simple as narrowing down your audience because many factors still come into play. You have to understand which markets are worth pursuing, as well as the type of content and channels you should be maximising.
Here are five steps that can get you started on using targeted content for your business.
1) Be specific with your target audience
You have to delve deeper into describing your target audience. Just stating their demographics, location, and economic status isn’t enough. You can go as far as saying what kind of television shows they watch, what organisations they’re a part of, or who are the personalities they follow online.
Again, visualise who they are. More than getting to know their interests, having an image of your viewer or reader will allow you to understand their daily routine, social media habits, and buying behaviour too. These are important to know when you create and distribute your marketing materials and communication campaigns.
2) Create content that is designed for them
When your target audience sees your content, you want them to react and respond. To do this, the content you create should trigger them emotionally. It should make them feel something so that they’ll want to know more and do something about it.
You can look into topics your audience cares about and creatively insert your brand to position it as something they might need or want for themselves.
As an example, let’s say you have an eco-friendly soap business, and you’re targeting the page followers of a local environmental clean-up organisation. To connect with that community, you can partner up with the organisation and create collaborative content on sustainability and caring for the environment.
3) Choose your placements wisely
Aside from creating meaningful content, a large factor of successful targeted content is reaching your target audience. No matter how good your ad is, if it doesn’t reach the right customers, then it doesn’t really do anything for you.
You need to study your target audience well and choose the best places to feed your content to them. Do they frequent certain websites or apps? Are there specific communities or key opinion leaders they subscribe to?
Once you figure those out, determine how you can put your content there so that they’ll be able to see it. You could align your content with the trends and topics your target audience engages with on those platforms so that you’ll get a higher chance of being seen on their newsfeed. See if you would also benefit from paid placements by assessing your reach to your target audience in those channels.
4) Measure the success of your content
It’s important to adjust your strategy if it’s not working. By using targeted content, you’re already focused on one direction so if you’re not aiming right, you have to move.
To help you measure the success of your strategies, you can set key performance indicators for factors such as engagement and conversions before executing your content plan. You can gauge the ideal numbers by computing the potential reach you can get or by researching the industry average. You can also use various strategy analysis tools to help you examine the performance of your business plans.
5) Consult experts
Planning your targeted content thoroughly is critical. You’re choosing to tap a certain group of people with content that’s made for them, so you have to ensure you’re investing in the right audience.
If you need support in this aspect or a second pair of eyes to check everything, consulting experts in the field would be of great benefit. Getting marketing directors and strategy directors as part of your board is a good way to start. They have years of experience and knowledge to provide you with the strategic direction and advice you need.
You can even work with them part-time if budget is an issue. It’s a more affordable and flexible set-up for businesses that are still in the early stages of growth. While you pay for a fraction of a full-time cost, you still receive all the pertinent insights and support to improve your business strategies.
John Courtney is Founder and Chief Executive of BoardroomAdvisors.co which provides part-time Executive Directors (Commercial/Operations/Managing Directors), Non-Executive Directors and paid Mentors to SMEs without either a recruitment fee or a long term contract.
