One of the golden rules of content marketing is “Know your audience.” If you don’t know your audience, creating content that resonates across all of your social networks is much more difficult. Unfortunately, you don’t always have that advantage. Your brand may be choosing to pivot, or you may join a brand whose current team is unsure. Although you should always work to determine that audience first, sometimes you just don’t have the ability or time to do so. If you’re pushed to create content marketing for an unknown audience, there are still some tactics you can try to help identify that audience and point you in the right direction.
Look for clues.
Are there social accounts already established for your brand? If so, that could give you some clues as to what demographic is interacting with you most in the social space. You can then use those clues to make some guesses about who would interact with you on a blog. Depending on your brand and the products you provide, you might want to search for your brand or products on Pinterest. If users are sharing them there, that might give you some insight about your current and potential customers as well.
Pick and test topics and categories.
If you’re trying to pivot or can’t really look to your social audiences for clues, you have an opportunity to play around with the content and determine what does and doesn’t perform so well. Come up with some potential demographics for your audience and then create a piece of content that appeals to one or more of those groups. If you notice significant traffic headed to one post in particular, you might be on to something!
Go general, but stay helpful.
If all else fails, determine what topics could appeal to all groups while still being helpful, quality content. For example, an interior design brand could determine what interior design tips everyone could use, rather than singling out the needs of new home buyers. Are there unique, specific challenges that customers of your brand as a whole might face? Try to create content along these lines that would be general enough to appeal to a larger audience until your boss decides who he wants to target.
Once you’ve determined that audience, here are four ways to develop content your audience wants to read.
