Council Post: How To Combine Your Business’s Content And Media Planning To Target The Right Audience

Finding a core audience to market to is a crucial part of making a business profitable. Many marketing departments spend thousands of dollars building a picture of their ideal customer to inform how and where they should market. Once they do that, it’s just a matter of unifying their content and media planning to target their product’s most viable buyers.

But how exactly should they go about this? What’s the best way to unify these two plans? To offer some guidance, eight professionals from Young Entrepreneur Council examine some of the strategies they recommend for combining content and media planning to target a specific market and explain why they’re so effective.

1. Zero In On Your Audience First

Conduct market research. When you look at your target market, look at every aspect of your customer to see which demographic factors you need to be zeroing in on. For example, a thorough buyer persona includes their gender, age range, geographical location, education level, political orientation and income level. With this information, you can organize a unified content and media strategy that includes elements, references and copy that appeals to these groups. Plus, it’ll help you decide where to publish and advertise your content. For example, there’s not much use in pushing content on TikTok if your target audience is, say, 50-something-year-old men from the U.S. Midwest. – Tyler Gallagher, Regal Assets

2. Have A Clear Goal For Each Content Piece

You should have a clear goal and target audience for every piece of content. If I’m targeting prospects, I try to zero in on a specific problem or industry and discuss ways our services can help them. Some content, such as posts on LinkedIn, may be more targeted toward business owners with a more technical background, whereas others are aimed at small retail businesses where the owners may not be familiar with technical terms. The content has to fit the right audience. Every business can do this, whether they’re trying to attract attention for a specific product or simply build brand awareness. If it’s the latter, you should still focus on something specific such as a topic or keyword that will appeal to your audience. – Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting

3. Let The Story And Distribution Inform One Another

Ideas and content are meaningless if no one sees them. You need to think about the two in tandem, working through your full plan simultaneously. First, who is your audience? Then, what’s the value you’re offering your audience with the meat of your content (advice? entertainment? information? insight?). What’s the story you’re trying to offer? Now flip to think about distribution. Where can you connect with your audience? Social? Email? TV? Somewhere else? Then flip back to the content. What formats will you need to work in the distribution form you identified? Rather than starting with the form first (e.g. a print ad or social media asset), let the story and distribution inform one another. The results will be far more effective and usually more interesting. – Britt Fero, PB&

4. Deliver Consistent, Cohesive Messages At All Stages

It’s important for any brand to deliver consistent messages across different platforms and strategies. Your media content needs to align with other content types or customers will be left confused. To make sure that there’s alignment, it’s critical to set up a clear vision for your company and why it’s trying to do what it’s doing. Then share that vision down the line. At the planning phase itself, decide the tone you’ll use, what your customer persona is and what your main selling points are. Document these points and keep referring to them. Stick to your documentation and vision and different teams will still be able to create cohesive messages and campaigns. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

5. Take A Storytelling Approach

The key is to make sure both content and media planning take a storytelling approach. Make sure you create an editorial roadmap for the year, and break down what the narrative will be each quarter (for example). Ask yourself, what journey do you want your customer to take every quarter? What message are you wanting to share? What value are you trying to provide or what action are you encouraging them to take? By planning out the storyline, you will see much more effective and satisfactory results than trying to sporadically share content throughout the year with no clear, joined purpose. – Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker

6. Leverage Auto-Share Tools

We use auto-share tools to share our content on social platforms as soon as they go live. This ensures that all our content has a social media presence that helps us reach out to our target audience easily. We also make sure that we reshare our content across platforms after a specific period of time. This keeps our content fresh and it helps us bring continuous traffic to our sites. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

7. Recycle Pieces Of Your Media Coverage

We are recycling pieces of our media coverage for our content marketing and social media planning strategies so we don’t have to create new content consistently and can target specific audiences. Companies can do the same by repurposing existing blog content for social media or media coverage for their blogs and newsletters. The best way to get started is by creating a spreadsheet with links to your media coverage and blog posts, then pull specific quotes or tips and use them for social media to target specific audiences. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC

8. Create A Strategy From Content Your Audience Interacts With Most

Content marketing and media planning should always go hand-in-hand. Think through the audience you are trying to reach first, then create the best content that will attract that audience. Get an idea of what content your audience is engaging with organically and then create a paid strategy around that messaging and content. – Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.