Your content marketing needs to target a particular audience if you want to experience success. I think this is a fundamental fact and everybody knows that. The problem is, how does this targeting work? How do you know whom to target and then target them with content marketing?
Even the “whom” part is quite easy. I sell my content writing services to people who are looking for high-quality content in order to improve their conversion rate and if possible, also to improve their search engine rankings. In my particular case, the problem is my niche is not clearly defined. Everybody who has a business on the Internet needs compelling content. So whom do I target? Again, people who are looking for high-quality content to improve their conversion rate and these people may have any sort of business (as long as that business is legitimate and truly serves people).
Targeting is very important and the more narrowly you can target, the better are your prospects and the greater is your expertise. I’m good at writing content for IT companies, web design companies and personal development agencies. Of late I have also been writing content for realtors, companies that deal with employee background checks and accounting firms and my clients have been pretty happy with the work. This gives me confidence in targeting these particular niches. If I target these, I can be pretty sure that even if not many businesses give me work, people working in these areas will definitely appreciate what I have to offer.
How do I target these people with content marketing?
Once you have figured out whom to target, you start creating and disseminating content about these niches. If I want to attract realtors I will write about how my content writing services are helping realtors get more customers. To create multiple blog posts and articles I may cite examples of various realtors who are doing great business because of my content writing services (with their permission of course). I can also talk about the various problems I come across while creating content for creating services and then how I deal with these problems. It can be as creative as it gets.
Targeting with content marketing means relating your service with your target audience and creating lots of content around that. This will also help you improve your search engine rankings. For example, make a list of keywords that involve your target audience and then also create a list of keywords that involve your own business and then combine these keywords to create blog topics, webpages and articles.
Of course content marketing doesn’t just mean writing blog posts, articles and webpages on your website. You need to make sure that the content that you create and publish reaches the right audience and for that you have to use the right platforms. For some, LinkedIn works. For some, it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a combination of these. Some prefer to target search engines instead. It depends on where your target audience is. You create content that caters to these audiences and then promote that content using the channels used by these audiences.