In publishing, art, and communication, content is the information and experiences that are directed toward an end-user Audience. 

Anything, any information, any kind of knowledge, any kind of creativity, and any kind of experiences that you are sharing with your targeted audience is known as content Writing.

While the art of marketing your content is known as content marketing.The one thing you need to know as a content writer.

Your target audience: whether you are writing a media post or you are writing a story or you are creating an audio, or social media post or article or technical writing. 

The next question you will be thinking about now is, why do you have to decide your target audience? 

 Why you have to decide your target audience because when it comes to content writing or any kind of writing,

There are two perspectives you must consider: The writer’s perspective: what you want to convey 

The reader’s perspective: what readers understand

When it comes to content writing, these two perspectives must be put in place.

It does not depend on what you are writing about. In any kind of content writing you want to engage in, the writer’s perspectives and the reader’s perspectives must be considered. Why you need to consider the reader’s perspective is based on the fact that, content writing’s first aim is to communicate.

Now let’s look at the difference between content writing and copywriting. People mostly ask me.

What’s the difference between content writing and copywriting?

This is one question that people who want to go into content marketing mostly ask me. Elisha “what’s the difference between being a copywriter and a content writer”?

Copywriting is persuasive writing. Any promotional or persuasive writing is copywriting First of all, copywriting is a part of content writing. While copywriting is any promotional or persuasive writing, the writing style of a copywriter is one known as “persuasive”. 

any style of writing that is made for advertisement, any Business promotion, brand promotion, sales promotion, or any kind of promotion that you are writing is known as copywriting and copywriting as I have said above is a part of content writing.

one of the major problems with brands is the fact that every day, businesses publish articles, podcasts, and videos that their customers just won’t see. 

That’s because it’s easy to produce lacklustre content that gets lost or ignored, and unfortunately, that’s what happens when many businesses don’t invest in content marketing. 

While it’s certainly a challenge, producing remarkable content for your customers is possible when you’re following the guidance of a content marketing strategy.  

A content strategy goal is a document where your organization or business should map out how exactly you’ll use content to reach your goals. Creating a strategy is an opportunity to define the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your approach to content marketing. 

With your content goals clearly defined in your strategy, it’ll be easier to set priorities, plan out each content campaign more thoughtfully, and collaborate with others.  

While just posting content on your brand pages doesn’t guarantee success, I’ve seen many businesses succeed with content marketing when they’re organized and deliberate. 

.   For me, the first and most important step to starting with a content marketing strategy is setting content strategic goals for my business so that the results am looking to achieve are clear from the beginning. 

A content strategic goal is an outcome that’s meaningful for your business, which should be easy to understand at a glance, and straightforward to measure. 

 Some common content marketing-centric goals are establishing thought leadership(which makes you a leader in what you are offering), improving customer loyalty, increasing sales, audience development, and earning brand awareness.  

One way to guide which goals you’ll focus on is by being aware of the two types of goals which are, ongoing and campaign goals. 

 The first is ongoing goals, which are meant to measure the results you’re looking to achieve regularly.   For example, let’s say your business publishes articles weekly, and your team would like to measure the ongoing engagement from visitors reading this content.  

While there are many ways to measure increasing engagement, you could look at how these articles increase or decrease the time spent on your website or blog every month. 

 This is considered an ongoing goal as it’s an outcome your business will likely monitor for the long term since there isn’t an end date associated with publishing these articles.  

 so what are your ongoing goals for your business?

listing five Campaign goals is another type of goal you’ll set as they are directly related to measuring the success of time-sensitive activities.   I recently worked with a client publishing case studies and an executive interview series as part of a three-month-long launch campaign for their latest service offering.

  For them, a major goal of this short-term campaign was to generate 300 leads from potential customers, providing their contact info in exchange for viewing their premium content.   This goal of generating 300 leads is a campaign goal because it indicates the progress of an initiative with a defined start and stops date.  

so what are your campaign goals for your business? So, keep these goal types in mind as you think about the right mix of outcomes to focus on. 

And remember that no matter what you’re content goals are, you are more likely to achieve them with a solid content marketing strategy.  So, start thinking about yours. 

Defining your audience or define your audience

who is this for? That’s what every content marketer needs to ask themselves before creating content of any kind.   Before planning your next goal or campaign, it’s essential to identify who exactly your audience is, what they want, and how you can best serve those needs with your content.  

When first investing in content marketing, many organizations or businesses make the mistake of focusing their campaigns too broadly in an attempt to connect with everyone. That only makes sense for large brands like Coca-Cola. 

Really, most companies or business target a very specific customer base.   Knowing who your customers are matters because you can better personalize your content to align with their backgrounds, interests, and preferences. 

This alignment increases the chances of your blog posts, videos, and other content, resonating with your audience.  

Creating a positive connection with them and driving action. That’s why I recommend creating customer personas to describe the different types of people your business serves so they can inform your approach to content on an ongoing basis.  

Think of the customer persona as a profile of your customers listing details about them based on their demographics, motivations, challenges, and mindset.  

This way, you can make more informed decisions about what topics to write about, which images should be used with your campaigns, and what types of content are more effective.   Compile two to five personas that reflect the specific groups of people that make up your customer base.

Then assign demographics and behaviours that define them. These personas can be as straightforward or complex as you prefer, as long as their informative and built from both research and observations about your customers.  

For instance, a newly launched online investment company wanted to better define who their customers were, so they can focus their videos on the needs of the right people.   They did that through customer surveys, collecting qualitative research about their backgrounds, behavioural drivers, and frustrations of first-time investors. 

 From this research, they created a persona they named the up-and-comer. The persona is a young professional, 30 to 39 years old, that’s just setting up their financial plan and is motivated to buy when they receive helpful investing recommendations without complicated jargon. 

 Having this persona in mind helped this investing firm create videos geared to this up-and-comer, offering the right advice and tone in their social media messages.  

Similar to this example, some of your content will be solely focused on addressing the needs of one particular customer persona while other campaigns may address a few at a time.   And now it’s your turn. Whether through conducting interviews, referencing research studies, running a focus group, or reviewing your existing customer data, it’s up to you to define who your ideal audience is. 

And the number one secret to excelling is choosing the right topics to focus your content on can feel overwhelming. With all the available options, it’s difficult to narrow in on which subjects your customers care about the most.  

And at this point, I bet you’ve experienced the frustration of publishing an article, or a report that you thought was the perfect match for your audience only to have it met with silence.  

I bet you, I have created articles that I thought would have a lot of engagement and surprise, the engagement I had was not more than 10 likes and comments. 

To avoid this, let’s review effective techniques for finding relevant topics. So start by referencing your customer personas. 

More specifically, the challenges each of these customers faced deciding which could be addressed in your content. 

 For example, a company or business selling agricultural equipment could review its customer personas, and identify that its customers struggle mostly with increasing their crop yield yearly and limiting operating expenses.  

These challenges should be then researched since they could be the ideal topics for this agricultural company to use to connect their customers through a webinar, e-book or a series of articles.   No matter what topics you’re considering they must be related to your organization’s expertise or goal, or the product or service you’re offering. 

If they aren’t, it might be too difficult for your audience to make the connection between the article they’re reading, the video they’re watching, and what your brand does.   For example, it wouldn’t make sense for this agricultural company to produce content about the best video games being released this month.  

It is just not relevant to them or their customers. Another useful source of topic inspiration is paying attention to patterns in the questions and feedback you receive from your customers. 

Is there a topic or question that keeps popping up from your customers over email?   Maybe this might be a place to start as a topic to cover. Keeping records of common questions or pain points will help you down the road when looking for topics to cover.  

This feedback can be indirect as well if you have access to behavioural data about your customer’s activities through an analytics tool, CRM or a POS system.  

For instance, you might review your analytics to understand what content kept visitors on your website the longest or pay attention to which tweets generated the most feedback.   These spikes in activity can indicate what types of topics you might want to explore further.  

Lastly, it is great to review what’s already been published. This is less about keeping tabs on competitors and more about finding the gaps in what’s been covered by googling a topic you’ve been considering or searching on social media.    

When it comes time to ask what topics you should be covering with your marketing, remember these techniques for identifying topics that matter to your customers.