Content writing. Step 1 – know thy audience

At Ion Leap, our constant refrain is that your company’s content writing is a very important part of your brand. Success at this can be broken down into logical steps. This is Step 1 of what will be a series. I’m not going to give away too much, but you’ll get some good detail out of it.

The Gutenberg Bible. These guys knew their target audience.
Thus their continued success.

I’m always amazed at how few companies spend real time and money getting to know their audience. When this step goes wrong, every other time investment you make in your content will miss the mark.

The best way to understand your market is to look for consistencies in who’s buying your product now. If you’re collecting data on them, this will be easier. Cross tab it with other resources like credit information and you’ll know which of your current customers has equity in their homes, paid off their car loans, have septic systems, etc. There’s a wealth of data out there which you can cross-tab with your current data and it’s all perfectly legal.

Look for seasonality. You can measure this both in your sales and in your web traffic. This can lead to an understanding in how long it takes to close a sale. Too many companies rely on anecdotal information from the sales force for this.

Look for consistencies in demographics, geography, income, purchase behavior, product preference, etc. In other words, get serious about knowing your audience. Effective content writing can’t really speak to your best prospects until you know them fully.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as hammering out content writing that you know for certain will work. And if you fully know your audience, your content writing will connect in ways that other marketing efforts simply miss. It’s such a satisfying feeling to sit back and watch the sales results pour in.