Whether we do it explicitly or not, we all make assumptions about our audience when developing content. For example, in writing this blog post, we are assuming that the readers are interested in content marketing. That is a pretty safe assumption since the title is more appealing to those interested in content marketing than those who are not.
However, if we were also to assume that the readers of this post are interested in Taylor Swift and we spent a lot of time talking about Shake It Off, then we might be wrong…or we might be right. We really don’t know since we haven’t conducted research to know if there is a high correlation between those interested in content marketing and those who are Taylor Swift fans. And that’s the point. Many content marketers don’t have the budget to conduct extensive research about their target audience so they often have to make assumptions.
We just came across a couple of interesting articles on making assumptions about your content marketing audience. Earlier this year, CoSchedule published a blog post, “Are You Making These 5 Assumptions About Your Audience?,” that starts off by saying “making assumptions about our audience is one of the worst things we content marketers do. We end up creating content that makes our audience feel stupid.” The article goes on to list the ways in which content marketers make bad assumptions.
Then, Business 2 Community published an article, “How To Make The Right Audience Assumptions In Content Marketing,” that argues assumptions are necessary and it goes on to explain how safe assumptions can be made…
Start by segmenting your audience into large, overarching categories such as “gardeners” or “fitness enthusiasts.” You’ll probably have a few groups across various categories, and that’s OK. From there, start finding behavioral traits to break them down even further.
At Keywee, we feel we are entering an exciting phase where content marketers will need to make less and less assumptions about their audience. There is so much data available – particularly in social platforms like Facebook – about users and their interests so market research is not as necessary as before.
But how do content marketers leverage all of that data to gain a better understanding of their audience? Well, that’s why we built our audience graph, to solve that exact problem. We foresee a time in the not-too-distant future where you can stop making assumptions about your audience and you will know exactly what they are interested in reading. Sounds pretty cool, huh? Or, are we making a bad assumption about what you think is cool?
