What are the best ways to conduct audience research for content marketing?

Please be clear about the goals that you intend to accomplish. Quite often, content marketing plans fail owing to unrealistic expectations and a lack of understanding of the timelines needed for success. Build content in different formats for superior engagement and share the content across organic and paid channels whenever possible. Get your existing audience base to engage with your content and turn them into ambassadors. Build content that helps you engage your audience across different stages of the funnel and reap the rewards with a persistent media strategy aimed at driving maximum awareness/views.

You can only be clear about your overall goal. You can also decide on the KPIs you'll use for different content types or funnel stage users. Setting up detailed targets at this point is futile: you have no clear view of your target audience or you're benchmarking and forecasting using data from a time that you didn't target/understand this audience. This is also why expecting to know your buyer's journey at this point is unrealistic (or confirmation bias). Define: - Your budget - Your ultimate goal: this can be in the form of a "vision" or more specific (e.g. "I will make X the go-to website for everyone who wants to learn content marketing" or "I will 3x organic traffic to the blog in 12 months" - Your core KPIs - Your resources

Don't underestimate the power of forums like Reddit and customer/product reviews. These sources can be loaded with insights on pain points, voice of customer, and customer journey.

Some great existing sources of audience insights: - Google Analytics (or similar) - YouTube Studio - Social media analytics/reports - Demo calls/transcripts with prospects/new clients - Emails between prospects/customers and sales/customer success - Conversations on chatbots on your site - Interactions (comments, direct messages) between your business and users on social media - Questions and topics around your company or your competitors posted on sites like Quora, Reddit or industry forums - Product/Service reviews on Google, Amazon and elsewhere - Keywords and queries your site is being found for (you can get these from Google Search Console) - Keywords your competitors are being found for (can use a tool like Semrush)

The best way to get audience inside is by looking at the reviews of existing products or topics. This could either be in the review section or type in "x product" review. This will help you understand audience pain points, concerns, and joys. You can also look in the comment sections of top creators in that niche. As well as reaction videos to their content if there are any. When you do this, you can make your content way better.

Arguably the best way to conduct primary research is through one-on-one customer interviews. Listening to sales calls, analyzing surveys, looking at heat maps...it's not enough. In order for content marketers to be *really* effective, they need to set up interviews with customers and ask really insightful questions. People are more willing to share in person (vs. a survey) and when it's not on a sales call (no potential ulterior motives on either end).

To start my research, I read the company's news and press releases. I also look at their LinkedIn page and the profiles of people I'm interested in. I search on Google to find any success stories or case studies about the company. Checking the job openings they have can help me understand what kind of technology or skills they're looking for.

The two main problems with audience personas becoming the A to Z of personifying your target audience are: 1. They are often built based on flawed or limited audience research 2. They carry their creators' biases If you are going to create audience personas do so: - After having conducted proper research - But keep in mind they're not supposed to represent everything your audience stands for, so don't try to justify each little piece of content marketing based on targeting a persona every time - Look out for established stereotypes making it into your personas (gender, race etc.) - Run them past other teams (or even your friends) to review and uncover hidden biases and risks

In my experience as a B2B marketer, understanding who your customers are and what drives their buying behavior is key to creating content that aligns well with them. Start with understanding their pain points and how your content affects them then focus on what your content needs to be in order for you to achieve your campaign goals.

Undoubtedly the audience persona helps to really refine your approach to content creation. Get into the minds of your audience and create content that address the most important pain points. By building the persona and by identifying different cohorts, you are one significant step closer to driving meaningful engagement.

By consistently leveraging qualitative feedback, you're aligned to both current and evolving desires from your target audience. If you're walking into a new company as a marketer, don't assume this is in a good place. 9 times out of 10, it's not. Do the research yourself so you can feel confident that you/your team aren't guessing.

To create good, meaningful content, you need to do two things right: 1. Pick the right topics to cover 2. Pick the right premise to cover it Most marketers make content decisions based on guesswork and assumptions. Deep VoC research and qualitative feedback is key. Things like... ➜ Surveys ➜ Reviews ➜ Sales calls ➜ Group panels ➜ Open field responses ➜ 1:1 customer interviews ➜ Customer success calls ➜ Website chat transcripts ➜ Webinar Q&As + comments ➜ Social post/group comments ➜ Company Slack channels for sharing feedback Everything will stem from your customers' minds and words and circle back around to them. You create a flywheel with an endless supply of knowledge to work with.