When you’re writing a blog, it can be tempting to just write about whatever interests you. You understand your business, and you’re passionate about your subject. It appears to make sense to write more about your products or about elements of your business that excite you.
Yet, this is rarely the right approach for any business. Writing general content is never going to achieve the same results as targeting a niche audience. In fact, it could even have a detrimental effect on your business.
Why is this the case? The reason is, primarily, down to forging a reputation for your business as an authority in your sector. When readers know they can trust what you say, your business gets a boost. More trust means more traffic, more traffic means more conversions, and more conversions mean more profits.
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The above graphic shows you the benefits of the target audience definition.
It is easy to see why targeting more narrow audiences is beneficial. Yet, if you still need more convincing, here are five reasons why general content doesn’t work.
1. Content That Speaks To Everyone Is Content That Speaks To No One
The danger of general content is that it’s targeting nobody. General content may speak to everyone, but it often ends up speaking to no one. Knowing who your target audience is will ensure that you pitch your content at the right level. This will improve your chances that interested readers will be able to find it, read it, and, hopefully, become customers.
When you can clearly define your business’s niches, you’ll find it easier to target your audience. The more defined your target audience is, the simpler targeting becomes. You can even have multiple target audiences – the key is to tailor content specifically to each one.
A clearly defined target audience makes it simpler to direct your content activity toward that group. Once you know who you’re targeting, you’ll be able to determine his or her precise problems. This, in turn, allows you to create content that solves those problems. Answering your customer’s questions reinforces your brand and helps you to gain their trust.
Not all blogs need a huge audience. In fact, if you have highly targeted traffic, it can offer you a host of advantages.
The above chart shows the difference between the use of general content and content targeted at a specific customer niche.
Visitors to a highly targeted blog are considerably more interested in what you’re offering. Even when the traffic volume is lower, it’s still possible to make more money. This is because you’re targeting an audience that is more willing to purchase and respond to your message.
A key takeaway from this is that you shouldn’t measure a blog’s success in its total number of visitors. Rather, its success relies on how effectively you’ve targeted its content, and how well the audience and content match.
The chart above shows that engagement and conversion are more important than traffic when measuring blog success.
It’s important to cover topics especially for the blog’s audience to avoid the dangers of generalized content. Narrow niches give you a clear idea of your audience’s interests. This makes choosing topics for blog posts much easier and quicker. When content is well-targeted, it helps with engagement and traffic, and thus, it drives up sales.
2. General Content Can’t Reach A Highly Responsive Target Audience
With broad, generalized content, the audience reached is unlikely to be a highly responsive one. General readers may or may not be especially eager to purchase your product or service. This means that, even if they read your content, it may not convert them into customers.
With a narrower niche and content that you have directly targeted at that specific audience, you’re reaching responsive readers. As David Hahn says, “The key ingredient to better content is separating the single from the stream.”
Directly covering topics of high interest to those readers results in a comparably high response rate. Every reader will have an interest in what you have to say. This is a top prerequisite for reader engagement, with engaged audiences being more willing to purchase from you.
3. It’s Hard to Write Quality General Content
The quality of your content is key to the success of your content marketing strategy. If you write general posts, it’s harder to ensure those posts are of the highest quality. With a narrow customer niche, it’s simpler to establish yourself as a specialist or expert in your field.
General content requires you to become an expert in many areas. This leads to you becoming a jack of all trades and master of none. It’s impossible to be an expert on every single topic. However, being a leader in your sector will turn your blog into the first-choice place to find relevant information.
After defining your target audience, you no longer have to stick to just one topic in your content writing. Rather, you can mix and match a host of ideas from various subjects. Just apply them to the issues your target audience has an interest in.
You must do this to stay relevant in today’s crowded marketplace. Entirely original ideas are in short supply. Usually, they’re composed of several ideas put together and picked up elsewhere. Seeing something in a different way is the best way to help your readers. Helping them to reframe their issues so they can see the solution more easily is important. It sets you up as a leader in your sector. They will also share it heavily.
Defining who your target audience is involves defining its problems. You’re then free to utilize your knowledge from all subjects to assist your customers in solving those problems. The result is more helpful, interesting, and novel ideas.
4. General Content Doesn’t Meet The Needs Of Those You Want As Customers
With generalized content across a broader niche, it’s hard to determine the best products to offer audiences. How do you decide which product a large number of your target audience would like? When you narrow down your customer niche, it’s possible to just ask the readers.
Alternatively, you can learn what’s missing, then provide highly targeted solutions and products. It’s easier since it’s highly likely your audience will have homogeneous needs. Therefore, most of them will need your product.
A highly targeted customer niche means it’s simpler to identify your product’s benefits for this exact audience. As a result, catching attention is easier, and you can convince your readers with the best arguments.
5. You’re Reaching Out To Everyone Instead Of People Who Want Your Products
When you write general content about your business, you’re not focused on anyone, but everyone.
If you don’t have a clearly defined audience, the subject matter you write about will then define you. Doing this means you end up with ill-suited content that won’t reach your intended audience.
Define your target audience clearly, and communicate with only them. You can choose subjects the audience genuinely cares about. This results in more traffic, more conversions, and more revenue.
How to Target A Clearly Defined Audience
Now you know why general content doesn’t work. You also know why you need a clearly defined audience. So, now, you need to know how to target them.
The first step is to develop your buyer persona. This is your ideal customer — the perfect person to purchase your product or service. Don’t feel you must restrict yourself to just a single persona. In fact, you can have several as long as they’re clearly and individually defined.
This chart shows that identifying your key buyer personas can help you spot gaps in your content. When you can pinpoint those gaps, you can address them. As a result, you will drive up traffic and conversions.
To create your buyer persona, you need to make decisions about all attributes of his or her experience and life. You must consider his or her age, family situation, educational level, and understanding of the English language. Is your persona female or male? Married or single? A student or working? The more information you have about the perfect buyer, the simpler you’ll find it to penetrate his or her niche.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBSc2pm8jpE&feature=emb_logo
The above video tells you more about how to research buyer personas for your organization.
Producing Your Targeted Content
After you’ve established your ideal buyer persona, you need to create relevant and targeted content. You will design this content to attract that precise buyer or buyers.
The key to penetrating niches is to identify potential buyers and segment them into lists. You then need to deliver personalized and focused content to all those groups. This will help you find the most profitable niche, and to isolate the most valuable customers and leads.
The best tool to use for this is e-mail. Narrow down the niche that engages most effectively with your brand. You can accomplish this by tracking open rates then taking note of the specific messages that resonate with most readers. This will enable you to begin delivering highly targeted content to the segments falling in your niche. Meanwhile, you can carry on delivering regular high-quality content to the rest of the list.
Blogs are also necessary and powerful tools for this purpose. You can use them to engage through social media and e-mail. Begin by addressing the most common needs of your buyer persona in your posts. You can then define the customers within that niche by writing targeted posts on each topic. Then, you track which ones receive the most engagement.
Once you’ve defined the kind of content that your audience is responding best to, you can ramp up content delivery. Write on the same subjects and continue tracking engagement, bounce rates, and page views.
Social media followers and your e-mail lists will deliver important and useful audience metrics. Paying close attention to these areas and your blog’s page metrics will give you most of the data you need. This will allow you to properly define your niche.
Make sure the content you’re delivering is relevant to every buyer persona’s requirements. This will have a major bearing on whether your prospective customers reach out to your business for help.
Creating Specific, Not General Content
Attracting business to your brand couldn’t be more important to your company’s success. Therefore, you can’t rely on general content to get the job done. You can’t take any shortcuts. Doing effective research and planning is vital.
The statistics above show that personalization can create impressive business results. Therefore, it makes sense to eschew general content in favor of a much more personalized approach to your target audience. This will allow you to apply maximum leverage to your readers and boost your conversions.
You need to make sure you’ve fully defined your target audience and drawn up buyer personas as needed. This will ensure you know what each persona is looking for when it buys from you. Tailoring your content to suit those needs will guarantee maximum appeal. You will drive up traffic, and, most importantly, it will be traffic that already has an interest in your products. Writing content specifically for this audience will guarantee ongoing enthusiastic engagement with your brand.
It can be hard to identify your customer personas. It can also be difficult to dedicate the time to creating targeted, high-quality content for your readers. This is where outsourcing to a reliable content marketing company, such as Varci Media, can help.
Our talented team members are experts in the field. They can craft outstanding content designed with your buyer personas in mind. You can be confident that we’ll help you generate regular content that speaks directly to your prospective buyers. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help.