When I ask you who your audience is, you might answer easily off the cuff:
- Suburban parents
- People who don’t qualify for standard insurance
- Techie gadget hounds
You could go on and on. There are lots of different ways to answer that question, and all of them lead to your making some assumptions about your audience that may not actually be accurate, even if you’re putting data behind your assumptions.
And yet I’m a huge proponent of focusing on your audience before you do anything else.
The trick here is to ask the right questions about your audience: Ask what problem you can solve for them.
The hard truth is that no one wants to buy your product.
What they do want is to solve their problems. And the good news is, they will buy your product, if it solves their problem.
Lots of people can’t get as specific about their audience as the examples I gave just a moment ago. They’ll say their audience is the general public.
Listen, folks: No one’s real audience is the general public. No brand. No organization.
And even if yours were, knowing that wouldn’t tell you much about what kind of content is useful to them.
Ah, but! But if you know what problem you solve, you know what kind of content you need to create. And it necessarily focuses your content work on the actual need of your customer, instead of demographic data that may be suspect or irrelevant.
Create content to meet your audience’s need.