Creating Content That Resonates with Your Audience (With Valuable Tools)
By Sarah Fournier, Creative Director and Partner at Colour and Code
In today's competitive marketing landscape, creating content that resonates with your audience is essential. With so much online content, audiences have become increasingly selective about what they consume and share. To stand out, you need to create content that not only captures their attention but also speaks to their needs, interests, and values.
Understanding how to create content that resonates with your audience can help you drive engagement, conversion, and loyalty for your brand or organization. Whether you’re a marketer, business owner, or content creator, there are many valuable tips, strategies, and tools you can use to create and distribute meaningful content.
What makes content good?
Oftentimes, brands think they’re putting out good content and are then confused when it doesn’t perform as expected. Good content is not marketing copy, a clever tagline, or information about your services or products. It is meaningful content that provides value to the audience and meets their needs, interests, and expectations. In order to produce content that is “good,” you have to consider what is relevant to your audience, and deliver it in a way that is authentic and engaging.
Good content is also not just about disseminating content for content’s sake. It should meet the business objectives and work towards increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving traffic, or converting readers into dedicated subscribers. Creating content that aligns with your brand voice, tone, and values can also help you deliver brand messages without forcing the point or pressuring your audience to complete a sale. To develop content that’s easily shareable and searchable, it’s important to consider the experience you want to deliver to your audience and the information they’re looking to access.
How to create content that resonates with your audience
If you’re ready to take the next step towards creating meaningful and valuable content for your audience, you can follow these steps for creating content that resonates with your audience:
1. Know your audience
You can only create content that resonates with your audience if you first know who these individuals are and what types of content they’re seeking. Knowing your audience’s needs, preferences, and interests can help you develop a content strategy and plan that connects with prospective customers and provides them with value to help meet their needs. Conducting research to gather data can help you determine who these people are, how they prefer to consume content, and what questions they may have. For example, if your audience is retired women who have an interest in quilting, your content strategy might focus more on creating content for Facebook instead of Tiktok. Understanding where your audience already gets their information allows you to meet them where they already spend their time.
If you don’t know who your audience is or where they consume their content, here are some starting points for gaining a deeper understanding to help you deliver good content:
Social media listening: Monitoring and analyzing social media conversations related to your brand, industry, or competitors can help you understand your audience’s interests. You can try doing this organically or use analytic tools to evaluate how your current content is performing and what types of information perform better than others.
Website analytics: Analyzing your website traffic and user behaviour can help you gain insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, and path through your site. Using audience and behaviour reports from Google Analytics can help you gain a better understanding of the content your audience is engaging with so you can optimize your site to meet their needs.
Customer feedback: Collecting and analyzing reviews and feedback from current customers can help you understand what your customers enjoy, what frustrates them, and what it might take to turn a one-time customer into a loyal fan. If you interact with your customers often, consider asking for feedback to help you better understand their pain points and how you can produce content to fulfil their needs.
Market research: While this sounds fancy, there are many ways of performing market research that can fit within your objectives, abilities, and budget. Exhibiting at a trade show and interacting directly with interested prospects can help you identify the common questions or themes and better understand the world view of the individuals coming up to your booth.
2. Define your objectives
Before you begin to create content with your audience in mind, it’s important to consider the marketing objectives of the content you wish to create. In business, there’s no such thing as sharing content for fun. If it doesn’t fulfil your audience needs, help to achieve your business goals, and align with your overall marketing objectives, you should consider why you want to create content at all and whether your time would be better spent elsewhere within your business.
Your objective may be to increase brand awareness, encourage customer engagement, generate business leads, or establish yourself or your business as a thought leader or topic expert. Ultimately, content marketing should support your sales and conversion goals by building goodwill with your audience and proving that you’re knowledgeable and interested in helping them reach their goals and fulfil their needs. Afterall, isn’t that why you have a business in the first place? To provide products or services that help people live better lives or improve their processes or happiness? Your content should strive to do the same.
3. Create content that resonates
When creating content, it’s essential to consider what your audience is looking for and how your content can provide value. Writing about topics that are relevant, authentic, and empathetic to their experience and needs can help you enhance your connection to your target market. You can use a variety of content types to tell your story and make genuine and authentic connections.
Here are some types you can use, with descriptions of what each involves:
Educational: This content type is designed to teach or inform an audience about a particular topic or skill. It’s often presented in various formats, such as articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and workshops, and may include tutorials, how-to guides, or informative articles.
Inspirational: This content is designed to motivate and inspire an audience to take action, consider a new way of thinking, or pursue their goals. This type is often delivered through speeches, stories, videos, or quotes.
Entertaining: Entertaining content aims to provide amusement, enjoyment, or distraction for the audience. Movies, memes, reels, comedy sketches, and music are considered entertaining content.
Informative: This type of content provides information or news about a topic, event, or announcement. You can present this content through news articles, blog posts, media releases, reports, podcasts, white papers, or infographics.
4. Distribute your content
Once you have your content written, designed, and ready to promote, it’s important to distribute it effectively to reach your target audience. You might have the best blog post in the world, but if no one knows about it, how can it bring value to your customers? You can use a variety of channels, such as social media, email marketing, digital advertising, or influencer marketing to distribute your content and reach your target audience.
In distribution, it’s important to consider how you plan to measure the effectiveness of your content using metrics like reach, engagement, profile views, and website visits. Determining the CTA of each piece of content and making it clear to your audience can help you measure the effectiveness of your content and determine its success. Having clear and measurable goals before posting can help you understand which types of content or themes resonate the most with your audience.
Tools that can help you develop valuable content
When creating content, it’s important to consider the content your audience is looking for. Here are some tools you can use to help you identify keywords, themes, and topics you can address in your content to fulfil your customers’ needs:
Google Trends: Google Trends can be used to determine popular search queries and topics, which can then be used to identify relevant keywords for content creation. By exploring the search trends over time, you can also identify emerging topics or areas of interest, allowing you to develop timely and relevant content.
Answer the Public: You can use this valuable website to identify commonly asked questions and topics related to a particular keyword or phrase. By understanding the questions and concerns of your audience, you can develop content that addresses their needs and interests and provides them with valuable information or solutions.
Chat GPT/Open AI: You can use AI platforms such as ChatGPT to generate ideas for relevant and engaging content topics based on the interests and needs of their target audience. By inputting relevant keywords or phrases into ChatGPT as identified by Google Trends and Answer the Public, you can ask the tool to generate a wide range of potential content ideas that resonate with your audience.
If you take one thing from this article, it’s that consistent, helpful, and thoughtful content will perform better than “fluff” content every time. Carefully considering your audience and crafting a content strategy to reach and engage them can help you build organic SEO, create meaningful connections, and establish yourself or your business as a reliable source of rich information.
Sarah is a marketing specialist and copywriter who develops communications, content marketing, and positioning strategies for businesses in Kawartha Lakes and beyond. Her company, Colour and Code is an ecosystem partner with offices in the Launch Kawartha space.