This is the third in our 3-parter on audience research. In the first one we covered why audience research matters and how to choose who to target, last time we covered how to carry it out, and this time we’re going to look at what to do with it.

As you go through your audience research, keep track of the goals, obstacles & risks that you come across. As you do you’ll notice certain topics recur (like the varroa one we covered last time). Aim for 3-5 in each category, ranked from most common to least. If you have an existing offering, list out the goals, obstacles and risks that relate to your products.

So now you have a detailed map of what your audience cares about - what do you do with it? In order to understand that, we first need to understand the concept of the funnel.

The funnel

Content is generally used to sell things that require a bit of audience education. if it were as simple as showing people an ad, we’d all just do that instead. Who needs the headache?

There’s a concept called the “95-5 rule”, which states that at any given time, 95% of your audience aren’t looking to buy. Your job, then, is to make sure that they know who you are, what you offer and who it works best for so that when they are looking to buy, you are top of mind.

This is where the funnel comes in. The funnel (or the ‘buying journey’) describes the stages that a person goes through on the way towards buying your solution (or another like it), from perfect ignorance to once they’ve actually bought and need to know how to get the most of it.

There are a few different versions of it out there as different people add or remove steps, but it essentially goes like this:

For each of these stages, the formats (type of content you create) and channels (where you share that content) differ.

A person who doesn’t know they have a problem isn’t going to go to your website to read about it, so you probably need to explain it succinctly in social posts that are likely to end up in their feed, or in articles on the news websites that they follow.

For people who are right on the cusp of buying, they’ll likely be reading a sales page on your website, or maybe (stretching the definition of content here!) you might be sending them DMs to hold their hand through to purchase.

The goal is to create content that targets each of the levels of the funnel.

Taking each of the goals, risks and challenges that you uncovered in your research, you can map each onto the relevant stages of the funnel.

Solutions-aware and product-aware stage content will likely focus on how it mitigates any challenges that buyers face, for example, while content focused on the unaware or problem aware will likely be more focused on their goals and risks.

It’s also possible to set up your analytics and monitoring to help you diagnose problems in your funnel. If you have tons of followers and engagement on socials but nobody is visiting your website to learn more about solutions, that’s a clear signal you need to tweak the top of the funnel to better explain the needs for action. If you get a lot of web traffic but nobody buys, you need to do a better job explaining why your product is valuable.

A note on this: when building a funnel, it’s tempting to create content for ‘unaware people in the earliest stages. Don’t. Your best chance of getting someone to actually buy is to focus on the final stages first, because getting it right marks the shortest distance between them reading your content and becoming a customer. Build from the bottom.

You might even decide it’s not worth the effort to try to reach unaware audiences, and that you’re better off only going as high as problem-aware. That’s totally fair.

Put simply, the funnel gives you a map for the mental journey that your audience needs to go through before they become a customer.

Once you can conceptualise what your funnel looks like, and map the things that you know your audience cares about onto it. It’s a question of making sure you cover the entire thing end to end with the most useful content you can create, continually.

The easiest way to do that is with a content matrix, which is what we’ll cover next.

The content matrix

There are all sorts of clever and complex ways to come up with content ideas, but we aren’t going to bother with those right now.

The simple approach works, and when building out the funnel all you need to do is go through each stage and ask yourself “what would x type of content look like for this stage?”

Claude has created a helpful visual for me to help illustrate:

Essentially, it comes back to looking at the different formats and channels that work for your audience as they move through the funnel and making sure you have enough of each type to meet people where they are.

We can look at this through the lens of our student tutor example.

In the “unaware” stage: a data-led story on the volume of late taxation fines paid by first time filers, an industry trend report on how how software or AI is driving down the cost of having an accountant, or a diagnostic quiz that helps you understand whether you need to file a tax return (and ways you might save money).

Your job is to do the equivalent for your audience. To begin with, focus on making sure there aren’t any gaps in your funnel, but once that’s done you can begin experimenting with different approaches to find what works best.

Afterthought: Keep it going

In the early stages, it’s probably enough to treat this like a tick-box exercise, build out your content until you have enough at every step of the funnel before looking for ways to optimise at each stage.

Once it is built, however, it’s important to return to your research regularly.

Review analytics and monitoring at every stage to understand how social traffic is translating into website visitors, visitors into subscribers, and subscribers into buyers.

Most people don’t travel linearly down the funnel, but it’s the directionally easiest way to diagnose problems and stay on the right track.

Analytics are easy enough to review, but it’s important also to schedule in time to revisit your audience research regularly.

This may be staggered based on the effort involved - so one interview a week, but reviewing the news they read every day. The main thing is to make sure you’re hitting all types of research - interviews, reading what they read, reading what they say and search keywords - regularly.

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