How Ya'll Can Keep Things Real - Find and Give Readers What They Want
Your success lies in the intersection between what your readers want and what you have. The bridge that crosses that space is how you talk to them. You can continue to struggle against the content marketing grain and post whatever you damn well please, or you can get with the program and figure out how to figure out what your readers want. Once you know, you give it to them, and they reward you with the content marketer's favorite currency besides currency: likes, shares, email addresses, and lavish online attention that catapults you and your brand to global domination.
What you are trying to discover:
We can go back to simple sales technique for a moment and think about how a sale is made. The three factors below are indicators and obstacles you have to overcome to get them where you want them.
● Motivations
● Pain Points
● Hesitations
The motivation part is simple to unpack. That's what they want- it's what drives your audience, at least in the arena of the topic you are focused on with your content marketing. If you're a dog accessories store, what do you think motivates your customers to buy a product? Their total batshit obsession with Fido probably factors in.
A pain point is something that's a pain in your customer's ass. It drives them crazy. They can't even about it. Figure out what those pain points are and how your content solves them.
Hesitations in a buyer or clicker are things you have to overcome to convert. General hesitations are laziness, concern over cost, and fear of commitment. You can combat these issues by adding some urgency into your offers, giving something away for free, and explaining exactly what to expect to your audience. In your niche, there could be other concerns. For instance, an essential oil company may find their customers are worried about quality or how the sourcing of materials impacts the environment.
Methods:
With that understanding, I'm going to give up some good intel on how you can figure out all about your customers' needs, pain points, and hesitations. Check the method.
Research- Learn To Love It
It's easy to hate research, but I have an idea that will turn your beat around. Research is like bowling for dollars. It's like mining for gold. It's the work you're doing to get your income. Think about the money you're making (or how big your email list is about to get, depending on your point in the content marketing process) as you check out your stats. Make it a competition in your head and give yourself rewards for a job well done, if you have to. Like Nike says... you get the drift.
Analytics - Yours
Part of your daily routine must be checking your web stats to see how your page is performing overall and, most importantly, how each post has performed with your audience. Your post stats are indicators to you that your audience liked or did not like something. The likable quality could be format, the voice and tone of the post, or the topic. You'll still have to figure that out, but you'll at least know what posts to dissect for the best info on the motivation that drives your audience.
Maintain your comment section and keep an eye on what's going on. Which posts sparked the most conversation? Are they the same posts that got the most hits? Was there any criticism that you can use while you're cursing the evil reader who dare defile your pristine work? This goes for social media, too. Reading audience comments is a great source of info and if you respond, you might be able to draw them out even more about what they liked and did not like. It's ok to tell them that you want to cater to them! This is no big industry secret.
Analytics - Competitors
Your competitors can be a tremendous information source for you. Look at everything they are doing in the same way you're analyzing your results. BuzzSumo is a handy tool that will give you some comparable statistics rom the people who won't let you into their actual metrics. Perform your diligent keyword research and pop the topics you want to run with into BuzzSumo. See what posts align with your keywords that scored huge hits and dissect them. What can you do better than they did to grab that market share?
Twitter trends and internet trending tools can be helpful to check as well, but remember that what is trending overall in the vast arena of the internet may not speak very particularly to your audience. If you can piggyback on a hot trend and it makes sense, do it. If not, stick to your own topic area or to a hashtag you see others in your field using.
Ask
As I said earlier, it is not a secret that you want to please your readers, unless you are operating a psychic medium business. You get no quantifiable bonus points for figuring it out with black magic or through sending in ninjas. The best way to know what someone wants is to ask them.
You have an email list, use it to ask some questions! You can create a poll, a quick questionnaire, or even a totally open ended request to send in ideas. Tell them your most important goal is to provide them with things they want to read. You can even tell them that you need their help, sometimes a little sense of community grows out of this level of involvement with your audience. If you need to, offer some incentive to responders to get the info.
You also have a social media presence, and it's easy to poll your audience there as well. If you are down to three ideas for a post, slap up a poll and ask readers to pick what they want to read most. You can make a little contest out of doing this once a week or once a month, and it will feel less tedious to them. Since the internet loves a catch phrase, call it Follower Friday or some clever thing and watch it take off.
Whether by email, social media comment, or comment on your post itself, engage with readers who give compliments! Ask them what they liked best about it! "Gee, thanks, Matilda for saying you loved the post! That makes me feel great because that's why I do this in the first place. I'm always trying to make my site better for my readers. Would you mind telling me some specific things that you liked about the post, so I can stick with those trends or topics in my upcoming content?"
If you're especially brave, you can direct message the haters, too. Interacting with a troll is always risky business, but if you can manage it, you might get some helpful info on what you should stop doing that's pissing people off. If you can't get to them, ask them to private message you to talk more about their concerns.
Listen: It's Not Stalking If You're Going To Marry Them
Disclaimer: Do not actually stalk people- that's gross.
Your comments section can give up valuable info if users have a login identity associated with it. Check out what else they're reading and if they're commenting on that too. Compare, contrast, lather, rinse, repeat.
The same goes for social media. Check out what your audience is looking at besides your stuff. Peep their pages, check out their other 'likes' and see what you can find out about them. Read their public conversations with their friends. You may just find that people who love your ice cream are also all skateboarders. That's unlikely, but you don't know until you look! Now you come up with a post all about how to keep those drips off your decks and you're in the money.
If the business behind your content marketing plan has a product, go read the reviews of your biggest competitors. Everything customers complain about is a potential pain point that you can reverse engineer and figure out how to solve with your version of the product. The heavy hitter review sites are of course, Yelp, Amazon, and for the tech industry, the App Store and Google Play.
I know the readers here are forum savvy, so this tip should be a no-brainer. Lurk around on message boards and forums that relate to your topic and see what people love and what they hate. You can glean a lot of powerful information from sources that see themselves as authorities in their own right.
If you have other ways that you stay in touch with the needs of your audience, let me know in the comments!
What you are trying to discover:
We can go back to simple sales technique for a moment and think about how a sale is made. The three factors below are indicators and obstacles you have to overcome to get them where you want them.
● Motivations
● Pain Points
● Hesitations
The motivation part is simple to unpack. That's what they want- it's what drives your audience, at least in the arena of the topic you are focused on with your content marketing. If you're a dog accessories store, what do you think motivates your customers to buy a product? Their total batshit obsession with Fido probably factors in.
A pain point is something that's a pain in your customer's ass. It drives them crazy. They can't even about it. Figure out what those pain points are and how your content solves them.
Hesitations in a buyer or clicker are things you have to overcome to convert. General hesitations are laziness, concern over cost, and fear of commitment. You can combat these issues by adding some urgency into your offers, giving something away for free, and explaining exactly what to expect to your audience. In your niche, there could be other concerns. For instance, an essential oil company may find their customers are worried about quality or how the sourcing of materials impacts the environment.
Methods:
With that understanding, I'm going to give up some good intel on how you can figure out all about your customers' needs, pain points, and hesitations. Check the method.
Research- Learn To Love It
It's easy to hate research, but I have an idea that will turn your beat around. Research is like bowling for dollars. It's like mining for gold. It's the work you're doing to get your income. Think about the money you're making (or how big your email list is about to get, depending on your point in the content marketing process) as you check out your stats. Make it a competition in your head and give yourself rewards for a job well done, if you have to. Like Nike says... you get the drift.
Analytics - Yours
Part of your daily routine must be checking your web stats to see how your page is performing overall and, most importantly, how each post has performed with your audience. Your post stats are indicators to you that your audience liked or did not like something. The likable quality could be format, the voice and tone of the post, or the topic. You'll still have to figure that out, but you'll at least know what posts to dissect for the best info on the motivation that drives your audience.
Maintain your comment section and keep an eye on what's going on. Which posts sparked the most conversation? Are they the same posts that got the most hits? Was there any criticism that you can use while you're cursing the evil reader who dare defile your pristine work? This goes for social media, too. Reading audience comments is a great source of info and if you respond, you might be able to draw them out even more about what they liked and did not like. It's ok to tell them that you want to cater to them! This is no big industry secret.
Analytics - Competitors
Your competitors can be a tremendous information source for you. Look at everything they are doing in the same way you're analyzing your results. BuzzSumo is a handy tool that will give you some comparable statistics rom the people who won't let you into their actual metrics. Perform your diligent keyword research and pop the topics you want to run with into BuzzSumo. See what posts align with your keywords that scored huge hits and dissect them. What can you do better than they did to grab that market share?
Twitter trends and internet trending tools can be helpful to check as well, but remember that what is trending overall in the vast arena of the internet may not speak very particularly to your audience. If you can piggyback on a hot trend and it makes sense, do it. If not, stick to your own topic area or to a hashtag you see others in your field using.
Ask
As I said earlier, it is not a secret that you want to please your readers, unless you are operating a psychic medium business. You get no quantifiable bonus points for figuring it out with black magic or through sending in ninjas. The best way to know what someone wants is to ask them.
You have an email list, use it to ask some questions! You can create a poll, a quick questionnaire, or even a totally open ended request to send in ideas. Tell them your most important goal is to provide them with things they want to read. You can even tell them that you need their help, sometimes a little sense of community grows out of this level of involvement with your audience. If you need to, offer some incentive to responders to get the info.
You also have a social media presence, and it's easy to poll your audience there as well. If you are down to three ideas for a post, slap up a poll and ask readers to pick what they want to read most. You can make a little contest out of doing this once a week or once a month, and it will feel less tedious to them. Since the internet loves a catch phrase, call it Follower Friday or some clever thing and watch it take off.
Whether by email, social media comment, or comment on your post itself, engage with readers who give compliments! Ask them what they liked best about it! "Gee, thanks, Matilda for saying you loved the post! That makes me feel great because that's why I do this in the first place. I'm always trying to make my site better for my readers. Would you mind telling me some specific things that you liked about the post, so I can stick with those trends or topics in my upcoming content?"
If you're especially brave, you can direct message the haters, too. Interacting with a troll is always risky business, but if you can manage it, you might get some helpful info on what you should stop doing that's pissing people off. If you can't get to them, ask them to private message you to talk more about their concerns.
Listen: It's Not Stalking If You're Going To Marry Them
Disclaimer: Do not actually stalk people- that's gross.
Your comments section can give up valuable info if users have a login identity associated with it. Check out what else they're reading and if they're commenting on that too. Compare, contrast, lather, rinse, repeat.
The same goes for social media. Check out what your audience is looking at besides your stuff. Peep their pages, check out their other 'likes' and see what you can find out about them. Read their public conversations with their friends. You may just find that people who love your ice cream are also all skateboarders. That's unlikely, but you don't know until you look! Now you come up with a post all about how to keep those drips off your decks and you're in the money.
If the business behind your content marketing plan has a product, go read the reviews of your biggest competitors. Everything customers complain about is a potential pain point that you can reverse engineer and figure out how to solve with your version of the product. The heavy hitter review sites are of course, Yelp, Amazon, and for the tech industry, the App Store and Google Play.
I know the readers here are forum savvy, so this tip should be a no-brainer. Lurk around on message boards and forums that relate to your topic and see what people love and what they hate. You can glean a lot of powerful information from sources that see themselves as authorities in their own right.
If you have other ways that you stay in touch with the needs of your audience, let me know in the comments!