Optimizing Content for Your Audience

Optimizing content for your audience helps you persuade your visitors to take the steps you want them to take. It means taking a close look at the audience segments you serve and delivering content that meets their needs.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the concept of segmenting an audience. Then we’ll consider different ways of optimizing content for your specific audience segments.

Segmenting Your Audience

Segmenting your audience is important for any organization. It’s tempting to believe that the general public would be susceptible to your pitch, but this approach leads to fuzzy messaging and poor results. Marketing to everyone is the same as marketing to no one.

Psychographic factors include personality, attitude, values, lifestyles, social class, and activities, interests, and opinions. Psychographic data help marketers characterize an audience based on its members’ state of mind.

Behavioral factors describe the way your target audience behaves with respect to your product or service. Behavioral segments include buyer readiness, loyalty, and occasions for sale or use. The marketing funnel, which we have discussed in several places, is a model of behavioral segmentation.

The Scotts Example

Dan Shewan shows the power of audience segmenting in the Wordstream post Everyone Is Not a Demographic: A Guide to Target Markets for Small Businesses. Drawing on examples such as Scotts garden care products and Lush cosmetics, Dan shows how organizations can come up with precise definitions of certain audience segments. The trick is to combine existing data with inferences and supplemental market research. His analysis combines demographic and psychographic methods of segmentation.

Dan starts with the assumption that Scotts’ customers are predominately male, a notion supported by the site’s color palette and masculine imagery. He guesses that Scotts’ customers are mostly homeowners because renters and condo dwellers are not usually responsible for garden care. He also notes an announcement that Scotts is sponsoring NASCAR champion Greg Biffle, which suggests that many of its customers are interested in sports.

The homeowner status of Scotts’ customers yields the most interesting insights. Drawing on data from Bankrate.com, he obtains the average size and term of a U.S. mortgage and the prevailing interest rates, which allows Dan to calculate the average gross income of Scotts’ customers.

Why is segmenting important? It helps you sharpen your messaging, targeting the interests and concerns of your specific audience. It helps you choose language, imagery, and color schemes for your content—or to rethink your brand expression completely if you realize that it doesn’t align with your target audience.

Segmenting also helps you figure out how to reach your people. Knowing the gross income or other interests of your typical customer can be valuable. With a little additional research, you can learn where the bulk of your customers go on the Internet—and target your audience with ads that appear in the places they are most likely to visit.

Optimizing Content for Audience Behavior

Optimizing content for audience behaviors means creating content for the specific stages of your marketing funnel.

The marketing funnel is a metaphor, but the journey it describes is real. Whenever we make a decision, we pass through the stages defined by the funnel. First, we discover an organization. Next, we consider the solutions it offers. Then we convert, or take the action we are invited to take. Finally, we come to the retention stage. In this final stage, we either remain engaged with the organization or move on to a competitor.

It’s important to recognize that every prospective customer takes a slightly different path through the funnel. Not all customers consume your content in the same sequence. Some customers may visit certain pages more than once. That’s OK. We compensate by planning for various scenarios and incorporating some flexibility.

At HubSpot, Corey Wainwright describes her mapping process in How to Map Lead Nurturing Content to Each Stage in the Sales Cycle. She follows a three-stage funnel model, but we can still apply her reasoning to the four-stage model we follow here.

First, Corey charts specific customer pathways through your content, based on actual visitor data gathered by HubSpot’s CRM application. She usually finds that certain patterns appear in the data, with some pathways being followed more frequently than others. These are the ones she attempts to optimize. She looks for gaps in her content, places where she could provide additional information to nurture a lead.

The stages of the funnel correspond to a buyer’s states of mind. That’s why we need to optimize our content to fit each stage of the funnel—to meet the needs of our buyer as she travels through the funnel.

Mapping Content to Your Funnel

Katie Joll of AudienceOps describes a different process in How to Map Content to Different Stages of the Marketing Sales Funnel. She asks us to imagine two different customers visiting a brick-and-mortar store. One customer is annoyed by an aggressive salesperson, who begins badgering her the moment she enters the store. Another customer is ready to buy but cannot find a salesperson to help him. Both customers are unhappy because their needs are unmet.

Brick-and-mortar stores must respect a prospect’s position in the marketing funnel. Online businesses have to do the same thing—respect their visitors’ funnel position by providing appropriate content. Katie proposes tactics and content types for each funnel stage, which I summarize here:

Back at Moz, Katy Katz adds a final piece of the puzzle in Here’s How to Visually Map a Content Strategy. She uses a slightly different funnel model than Katie Joll, but she asks us to imagine the customer’s state of mind—and provide the content needed to move the customer to the next stage of the funnel.

Merging her model with that of Katie Joll, we end up with a matrix like this:

It’s all a matter of relating to your audience. If you can answer the questions in the last column, you can be quite persuasive.

Optimizing Content for Audience Personas

Optimizing content for different audience personas is another way to segment an audience. In this case, however, we use psychographic principles, such as interests or level of knowledge. Like behavioral segmentation, it provides a way of relating to your visitors.

Niti Shah shows us two methods for optimizing content in her HubSpot piece The Purpose of Repurposing Content—one for audience behaviors and one for audience personas. Niti uses a three-stage funnel as her model, but we will adapt her discussion to the four-stage model we use here.

There are many ways of optimizing content for different audience personas. Niti uses the subject’s level of knowledge in a particular topic, focusing on beginner, intermediate, and advanced visitors.

Niti builds out her funnel design by creating a matrix. The left-hand column lists her marketing personas. The following columns list her funnel stages.

We’ll build a similar matrix, using the four-stage funnel model we discussed in Optimizing Content for Audience Behavior. I orient my matrix differently than Niti, listing funnel stages in the left-hand column and personas across the top. For convenience, I’ll retain the columns that list our objectives and our visitors’ thoughts, feelings, and concerns. I differentiate my personas by their level of knowledge in the subject matter pertaining to my solution—beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

The resulting grid looks like this:

In each cell, I add a mix of content types appropriate to the funnel stage and catering to each persona. And voilà—a perfect map for optimizing content for different personas.

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