This week
This edition (and the two to follow) is meant mainly as a reminder to myself to do the bit that everyone (myself included) should do, but rarely does: spend more time researching what your audience actually wants.
Content is too often written from a perspective of ‘getting the message out there’. People start with the question “what do we want to say” rather than “what do people want to know”.
So the next few editions will focus on talking to readers, and more broadly what audience research looks like for content.
This week I’ll look at why to do it, audience selection, and what you’re actually looking for. Next week, I’ll look at how to do the research and structure the outputs, and then the week after I’ll look at how to turn what you’ve learned into content.
Let’s get started.
Why do audience research?
For the most part, ‘quality’ is a subjective measure. Research helps you to find what it means for your audience.
It’s possible, without a ton of work, to continually learn more about what your audience wants and how they want to hear about it. Done right, it can also tell you what to launch next and how to promote it.
It works like this:
Customer research leads to ideas for content
You create the content.
To promote it, you write a series of social posts focusing on different aspects of what was covered.
The performance of the content tells you how interested your audience is in the topic (signalling demand), and the relative performance of your different social posts shows you how to position it - if you run a gym and all your posts about building muscle flop, but ones about fat loss get loads of engagement, that’s a clear signal where your marketing budget should focus
Based on how well (or poorly) the content did overall, you may then decide to do a follow up, diving deeper into the topic, learning more about the demand and building your authority as an expert on the topic.
Of course, before you can begin your research you need to know who your audience are, so let’s start there.
Make your target smaller
As a rule, almost everyone starts by targeting too large an audience. They assume, quite sensibly, that larger group of people = more people who might be interested.
What you want instead is a small enough group that you can create something that is genuinely useful to them.
The way to do that is by going more niche, even if that means only targeting a part of your overall target audience.
As an example, if you try to start a blog on cooking, it will be harder to find and serve a dedicated audience than a blog on vegan cooking, and that in turn would be harder than a blog on vegan cooking for people on a budget.
(This might sound like an impossibly narrow niche, but it isn’t. Ask Jack Monroe.)
That initial scope can expand over time, but to begin with it’s easiest if you aim narrowly.
Start by targeting your best customers - those who spend the most, have the highest usage or lowest churn, need your offering the most or are the most pleasant to work with.
Some people even recommend imagining a specific person (fictional or real) and then writing everything as though you were writing it solely to them. I’ve always found that odd, but if that works for you, fine.
What to look for
As we’ll see, there are a lot of ways to carry out audience research, from one-to-one interviews to lurking on forums. No matter where you do it, what you’re looking for doesn’t change:
First off, you want to understand their goals. What specifically are they trying to achieve? As we’ll cover in the next edition, this can be broader than it might initially appear. Nobody has the goal ‘buy a vacuum cleaner’, their goal is probably ‘have a clean house’. What is the outcome they are looking for?
Secondly, you want to understand the risks they want to minimise. This might be the threat of disruption from a competitor, a market shift that might make their company obsolete, or anything bad enough that it would compel them to act.
Third, the challenges and obstacles they face to achieving their goals. Perhaps they don’t know where to start, maybe they know what they need but not how to achieve it, or maybe they’re sceptical about whether they can trust the solutions on offer.
Finally, with all of these you want to get a sense of how important each of these factors is to them. There’s no point spending time helping them to solve minor annoyances, focus on the life-or-death stuff.
To recap: start with a narrowly defined audience — your best customers, not your biggest possible market — and focus on understanding what they're trying to achieve, what they're afraid of, and what's standing in their way.
Prioritise the things that matter most to them, not the things that are easiest for you to talk about. Next week, I'll get into the practicalities: where to do this research, how to structure what you find, and how to make it actually usable.
Research & Reading
What did you like about this week’s newsletter? What did you hate? Please hit reply and let me know!
How would you rate this week's edition?
If you enjoyed this edition of Owned, please forward to a friend.