Welcome to the series “How to create valuable content for your audience”. The purpose of this series is to give you a foundation of how to create valuable content for your audience to host on your website or social channels.
Part 1: Understand your audience and what they want
The first step to creating better content for your audience is to understand what your audience wants from you and how they perceive you. In this article we are going to focus on what your audience wants.
Understanding why your audience visits your website and what content they seek is crucial part of the process that ultimately ends in creating life-long customers. You can begin to do this by analysing some of the existing content on your site using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Some key metrics to examine are;
- Most visited pages
- Most popular entry points
- Queries
- Checking which content that has earned you links so far using SEMRush or your preferred SEO tool.
From there you need to ask yourself why these pages might be resonating most with your audience?
The answer commonly lies with the intention of the user visiting the site and how well you are satisfying that intention. Generally, this can be broken down to 4 easy to understand audience intentions.
- I want to know
- I want to do
- I want to go
- I want to buy
‘Know’, ‘do’, ‘go’ are all informational requests and ‘buy’ is a commercial request. You can begin to apply this theory to potential content creation by understanding your audience’s intention in visiting your website.
Hypothetically, let’s say you are a car manufacturer. The brand that you’ve worked hard to create is seen as sleek and knowledgeable on all aspects of car production and manufacturing. Within your analytics, you can see that your audience is engaging frequently with your tyre content, specifically winter tyres, but is not converting. One of the intentions the content is not satisfying is “I want to know which winters tyres are right for my car”.
To produce content on tyres appropriate for certain vehicles on specific terrains and seasons or even enhance the existing content with that intention in mind would be valuable for the audience and on brand. You can apply the same approach to the other intentions of “do”, “go” and “buy” from the audience’s perspective of that topic or page.
For further assurance that you’re making the right call with your content decisions, you can use a handy tool called Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo allows you to check to see if your content idea is popular amongst your audience, what kind of content is performing well and how you can best approach it to maximise its impact.
Additionally, Google Trends can enable you to see if a topic is popular, when it would be popular, it’s growth, decline etc. It can also recommend other aspects of the topic/keyword you should be targeting for your content too. As the title suggests, winter tyres is likely to be a more seasonal search so we can adjust our traffic expectations accordingly.
Continuing with the car manufacturing theme, the same brand has an audience who love to drive and travel. They want travel to destinations round the world to drive on the most picturesque roads. Tools that can help you obtain this valuable information are tools like YouGov and the ‘Interests’ category within Google Analytics.
Let’s say the audience intention is “I want to drive on the best roads in the world”. This would fall into the ‘I want to do’ category. By understanding that your audience has a passion for driving, travel and their intention, you can produce another piece of content that provides details on the company’s best suggested routes around the world.
You can expand by creating (or curating) videos, images, maps and a guide or whatever format you deem useful to the audience to help them gain the most from the hobby they love.
If you have a strong idea of who your audience is, why they come to you and how you satisfy their intention, you can begin to build up a bank of content suited to their needs. Essentially, you want to play to your strengths and create the best one-stop shop that your company does.