Marketing is little more than a big, complicated game of trial and error, especially at the beginning. The more you get to know your audience and customer base, the easier it becomes to present content that will be received well by the majority.
However, it is important to remember that optimizing and maximizing your audience is an ongoing process that touches every corner of content marketing. Market demands shift constantly. This makes it necessary to always be watching and listening — watching how content trends shift over time and listening to the various forms of feedback you get on your content.
That feedback comes in many different forms. Here are just a few:
Site and Platform Metrics — This includes your website, social media, email, and more. All major platforms provide data that marketers can use to gauge how well people are responding to their content.
Social Media Engagement — Are people consuming and discussing your content? Are you joining the conversation on the regular? What do the numbers say about the effectiveness of your marketing across platforms? Should you ease up on ad spend on one network and boost it in another? These numbers will help you decide.
Autoresponder Metrics — How many people are subscribing to your list? What do open rates, click-throughs, and conversions look like?
Using these and the host of other tools at your disposal, you can start using some or all of the following strategies to develop content and variations on your content to help gauge the ways your audience responds best to your content. Let’s get started …
Keywords
Different keywords attract different users. What you know about your ideal customer should tell you a bit about how to address the different niches in your audience or customer base. Who actually appreciates your content the most? What words attract the best prospective customers? Tracking keywords and comparing metrics based on individual ones can, at least in part, answer these and other questions about your audience. The numbers can show you how to approach the right people on a marketing level.
Email Segmenting
Sending the same email to multiple list segments can help you discover which of your customers or prospects align best with your brand message. If you find it difficult to breach the 3 percent barrier in conversions in any specific segment, it might be time to get some help developing better (and more targeted) email content.
Titles and Subject Lines
A huge part of the success of blog and email content comes from how you present titles and subjects. Too static, cliché, or obviously sales-oriented, and people either hit delete or keep scrolling (and with good reason). Write subject lines, titles, and segment titles that pique curiosity and make people want to know more.
If a blog post isn’t doing well, try tweaking the title. If email opens are lagging, try sending the same email with different subjects to list segments that demonstrate comparable open behaviors and gauge which one gets the most opens.
You can then resend to the lesser-performing list with the stronger subject line and see if it nets a few more opens. Don’t do this at every point in a campaign since you will be sending duplicate content. Hint: The first message in a series is a good place to test open rates.
Ad Placement
While this doesn’t have that much to do with written content creation, there are ways to present ads on your pages that motivate users to click or tap on them. There is no set formula here — it’s all trial and error. Play around with ad placement until engagement with your ads improves. Oh, and making sure your blog content is good in the first place will help quite a bit. People need to visit your site and stay there for a little while before you can expect them to start clicking ads.
Visuals
This works best on social media. Try posting the same content with different visuals. Experiment with different image strategies until you hit on something that gets a higher percentage of users to stop scrolling and click on your content.
Calls to Action
Use a variety of CTAs in your content and take note of the ones that people follow. Also be familiar with the ones that they ignore. Both are important to understand. Over time, you’ll learn how to address your audience more persuasively.
Content Platforms
Don’t simply spin your wheels and keep spending money on ads on platforms that prove less than optimal for marketing your product or service. Just because Facebook is a huge, global network, that doesn’t mean that it is, by definition, necessary to be there or spend money there. If the majority of your engagement comes from Twitter, for example, focus your ad spend there and ease off of Facebook. Keep posting content and paying attention to underachieving networks but don’t throw good money after bad.
Final Takeaway
You can use any and all the above methods to get to know your audience better. If you need help developing quality copy for your split-testing needs, contact us. We are a vibrant, successful copywriting company with years of experience delivering top-shelf marketing content. We would love to talk to you about your next content marketing campaign.
