How would you feel after spending countless hours creating content that ends up having no impact whatsoever? It’s best imagined; it will be frustrating.
You can avoid this by analyzing your audience for better content. This is the foundation of successful content creation. It provides you with accurate data that shows your audience’s preferences and behaviors. Armed with this information, you can make relevant and engaging content.
Read on to learn how to properly assess your audience.
Summary
- Why Analyze Your Audience?
- Common Mistakes to Avoid When Analyzing Your Audience
- Tools to Use for Analyzing Your Audience
- How to Segment Your Audience
Why Analyze Your Audience?
The benefits of analyzing your audience are many. Research shows that analyzing your audience can improve engagement and is the future of content marketing.
Increases Engagement
By having a clear understanding of your audience, you can address their desires. This influences how they relate to your content.
Boosts Conversions
Similarly, because you are speaking to their needs and wants, you stand a better chance of achieving your goals. It could be more shares, likes, DMs, or sign-ups.
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Helps Prioritize Efforts
More importantly, analyzing your audience keeps you focused on what is most important. You will be able to double your effort on what is working and fix or leave out what isn’t.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Analyzing Your Audience
While analyzing your audience for better content has clear benefits, it’s not unusual to make errors. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid.
Assumption
It’s easy to presume that you know what your audience wants, but your gut feelings can mislead you. Only data can reveal their true preferences, behaviors, and pain points.
Relying on Broad Metrics
Although metrics like website traffic and engagement rates are important, there are not enough. Instead of monitoring only the overall follower count and engagement rate, you could segment your audience.
Knowing their demographics, lifestyle, and values helps you build a better relationship. This makes you understand their needs, which will impact your content strategy.
Ignoring Feedback
Feedback is invaluable if you want to stay in business. Think of your audience as your online advisory board that wants the best for you. You can’t afford to ignore what they are saying.
Their comments, criticism, and suggestions could be the path to your next breakthrough. However, you don’t have to wait for their comments; you can gather audience feedback through polls or surveys.
Tools to Use for Analyzing Your Audience
You don’t need an army of tools when analyzing your audience for better content. There are several readily available analytics tools that you can use for different platforms.
Website Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics monitors the number of visitors, pages they view, and time spent. It also tracks their interactions and their demographics.
In addition, you can identify the sources of traffic to your website. It shows how visitors found your site, whether through search engines or social media.
Google Analytics can also help you determine your audience’s passion. For example, a fitness coach notices that his blog posts on quick workouts get the most visitors. He could create more social media content on it and link more traffic to his site.
Social Media Insights
If you have a professional Facebook profile or a business page, you can assess several key metrics. Meta Suite will show you engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and followers.
There’s also post reach and demographics; to access some of these features, you need to meet certain criteria.
Just like Facebook since it is owned by the same parent company, they share some similarities. It tracks your story metrics like views and shares, profile visits, post engagement, and reach.
X (formerly Twitter)
You can view how often your tweets have been seen, the engagement rates, and the followers gained. It also shows the click-through rates on any links you share on the platform.
LinkedIn Analytics
This monitors the number of people who viewed your profile, post engagement, and your followers.
Email Marketing Analytic
If you use email marketing to promote your business, you already know this. Email marketing analytics measures the percentage of people who open your email. It also shows the numbers of those who clicked a link in the email.
This data can help you upgrade your email subject line, call to action, and even the email design.
Besides these, other alternative analytics tools like Buffer Analytics or HubSpot are useful.
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How to Segment Your Audience
Now that you understand the tools for gathering data, let’s see how to put the data to work.
Segmenting is the process of grouping your audience into different categories. This is important because all your audience won’t share the same behavior, needs, or wants. Tailoring your content to cover them all puts you in the right direction.
Here are some ways you can segment your audience:
Audience Demographics
This is important because it doesn’t only guide your content but also your preferred platform.
Age
A message that will interest millennials could repel Gen Z and vice versa. Age also influences your platform of choice and content format. For example, if Gen Z is your target, you may want to use short video formats for TikTok and Instagram reels.
Using the right tone and language for different generations will give your content maximum impact.
Related Post: A Guide to Understanding Different Content Types for Better Results
Gender
Sales and marketing make the best of this, but it also applies to every kind of content. That’s because the needs of women often differ from those of men.
Also, research supports gender differences in consumer behavior. As a result, what appeals to one might appeal less to the other.
Location
Don’t confuse this with just geographical location; it’s much more than that. If you have a walk-in store, location will matter a great deal.
However, if your business cuts across international borders, you need to know much more. An understanding of the time zones of your audience and the cultural differences is essential. You will need to know the right time to post and what might be offensive in some cultures.
Interests
It’s no secret that people spend more time on what interests them; you can key into this. For example, if you realize that a large part of your audience loves outdoor activities, you can add bits of it to your content.
Hobbies
Knowing your audience’s hobbies will help you create content that will appeal to them and keep them engaged.
Lifestyle
Segmenting your audience based on their lifestyle is useful for content creation. Are they tech-savvy or health-conscious? You might say that, well if those are not my niches, why should I care? You should.
If you have a non-tech-savvy audience, it’s best to use fewer techy words and simplified instructions.
Audience Behavior
This is categorizing your audience based on patterns of purchase, views, and preferences. It helps you identify how they have been interacting with your content. This history provides useful insights into what you can build your content strategy on.
Content Preferences and Trend Tracking
Topics that are trending as well as those with high search volumes drive engagement. They can also impact your content, so you shouldn’t miss them.
However, analyzing your audience won’t give you this information; you will need a third-party tool. Keyword research tools like Google Trends and Ask the Public will help you identify content trends.
For instance, if there’s a rising interest in sustainable fashion, creating posts or videos on eco-friendly fabrics will be great.
Don’t Miss our post on Repurposing Content for Maximum Impact.
Final Thoughts
Analyzing your audience for better content creation is crucial for your content and brand. It makes your tasks fruitful and impactful. Luckily, there are several tools that you can use to get started.
Though some will require payment for advanced analysis, the basics gives you a fair starting point.
Start today and analyze how your audience has been reacting to your content, and I bet ideas will follow.
Did you find this helpful? I’ve written other articles on content creation processes that might interest you.
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