Content Marketing: What Are Your Target
Audience’s Interests, Needs, and Wants?

Content marketing is all about quality content that grabs the attention of your ideal prospects and clients. If you want to create content that engages readers, you need to know their online habits and interests. Yet how many of us post on a blog or upload a video to YouTube without taking time to survey what are our target audience‘s interests, wants and needs?

Content marketing requires that you publish frequently on your site, your blog, and in social media. You want to focus your content on the keywords your prospects are likely to use in searches. You can’t do that without asking them what their interests are.

Here’s a quick list of survey questions to ask your target audience to help define what they want to read:

1. What are the five top web sites you visit frequently in your work?
2. What are your online reading habits, blogs, websites, articles, videos, podcasts?
3. Do you use social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
4. Which e-newsletter and blogs do you subscribe to?

You have about eight seconds to engage someone before they click away. Clever headlines and intriguing social updates will get them to click over to your content. But unless you know what your audience wants, you’re shooting in the dark. They won’t stay. Click and bye-bye. So how do you keep them on your site to read your stuff? What makes for effective content marketing?

Good content builds momentum and always has an objective, according to Ann Handley and CC Chapman in their book Content Rules. Therefore your content needs to trigger an action. That’s the way you engage readers to respond. Your content should be created with the end in mind: to further a relationship, make a sale, download a report.

But you can’t build relationships with people you don’t know.

I’m interested in knowing your top 5 web sites you visit regularly for work (besides your own, of course). Here are mine:

1. Gmail, of course
2. My client’s blogs and sites where I manage their content marketing
3. Alltop blog aggregation site: My Alltop page
4. Harvard Business Review blogs
5. Neuromarketing blog and Neuromarketing social networking site on Ning
6. Wikipedia

Of course, this varies. Some days I’m spending not as much time on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. Nevertheless, I feed information to them every day and respond to requests, even if I’m not actively conversing.

What about you? Let me know which sites are tops in your book in the work you do… hit the comment link and submit.