Yes, content is king – but what many people don’t realize is that knowing your audience is as important as the content itself!
To create content that connects with your audience, you need to know your audience like the back of your hand. This is where psychological characterization comes in.
Psychological characterization allows you to understand your audience on a deeper level. By understanding the motivations, values and behaviors of your audience, you can tailor your content to speak to their needs and interests.
In this blog post, we will explore the impact of psychological characterization and discuss how it can help you write more powerful content.
How Does Psychology Affect Your Company’s Content Creation?
When you think about it, psychology in content marketing is another way of saying “know your target audience beyond surface-level” – and this is a crucial part of any successful content strategy.
By understanding your target audience’s psychology, you can:
- Identify their pain points and desires, and craft content that resonates with them on a deeper level.
- Create headlines and angles that are more likely to grab attention and generate engagement.
- Determine the right channels to focus on and the type of content that will be most effective for reaching your target audience.
In other words, when you understand how your customers think and behave, you can create content that not only appeals to them but also compels them to take an action like buying or subscribing.
Segment Your Audience to Effectively Target Each Group
Segmenting your audience means grouping them based on certain traits. To effectively do this, you can segment your audience based on the following criteria:
- Geographic (location)
- Demographics (age, gender, income, etc.)
- Psychographics (personality traits, attitudes, lifestyle, etc.)
- Behavior (user activity, brand loyalty, product use, etc.)
By segmenting your audience, you will be able to spot common themes on their needs, wants, interests and demands, making it easy to craft a highly targeted content marketing campaign that gives better results.
If you find this task overwhelming, we have created an interactive buyer persona template as well as demographic and market research resources to help you get started. You can find it all in our playbook – it is free to download, simply click here.
Myers-Briggs Personality Types
Among the four categories of customer segmentation, psychographics is the hardest to get. But it gives the most valuable insights on what are the strengths, weaknesses, values, motives and preferences of your audience.
Myers Briggs is a popular personality typology system and is widely used in the marketing industry – why? Because it gives essential information on how people interact with the world and make decisions.
The Myers–Briggs has four personality key traits:
- Where do you get your energy from?
- Introversion (I) vs. Extroversion (E)
- How do you take in and interpret information?
- Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N)
- How do you make decisions?
- Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
- How do you deal with the outside world?
- Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)
Understanding the different personalities of your target audience helps you decide what is the best messaging, content type and channel to reach them.
For example, you have a blog post and if your reader is classified as “Feeling,” they will respond well to storytelling because of the emotional connection it builds. If your reader is a “Thinking” type then a blog post filled with facts and figures will have the best engagement.
How Different Cultures Affect Psychology and Behavior
When you segment your audience based on location, it is easy to identify their culture. The attitude, perception and interpretation of your audience is greatly shaped by their culture.
If you want to be global and target an audience across the border, knowing the norms, beliefs, customs, traditions and language of your audience will help you decide what is the most appropriate imagery, messaging and content type.
Analyzing and Interpreting Behavioral Data
Analyzing the behavior of your customer means you will be looking at:
- What are the products they buy?
- How often do they make a purchase?
- How loyal are they to your brand?
- What device do they use when they purchase online?
- What actions do they make on your website or app?
You will basically study past data to uncover trends, patterns and insights to help you craft better content that is relevant to the customer journey and behavior.
For example, let us say you own a sporting goods store. If someone bought cycling gear from you then it is best to send them with cycling-related content than fishing gear. If someone hasn’t bought from your store in months then you should be targeting them with different content as opposed to someone who frequently buys from your store.
Measure Customer Metrics to Help Drive Strategy
You probably now have a good idea of the types of content you want to create as well as the audience you want to target. But how do you know if your content marketing is actually working?
The answer lies in your metrics.
By measuring how your visitors, audience and customers interact with your content, you can determine what is working and what is not. This helps you make necessary adjustments to ensure that your strategy is as effective as possible.
The metrics that you need to keep an eye on depend on the goal you want to achieve – are you looking to increase brand awareness? Watch your new website visitors. Drive traffic to your website? Watch your acquisition data to understand what channels are driving traffic to your site. Increase leads and sales? Watch bounce rates and user behavior to understand at what point in your journey you’re losing shoppers.
Once you know what your goals are, you can start to measure the right customer metrics to help you achieve them. There are many different customer metrics you can track, but some of the most important ones include:
- Sales conversion rate (CVR) – the number of times your ad pushed your customers to take action
- Average order value (AOV) – the average amount a customer spends every time they make purchase
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) – the total amount a customer will spend on your business over time
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) – the amount you will spend to acquire a paying customer
- Shopping cart abandonment rate – the number of times customers add items to their shopping cart but did not complete the checkout process
- Net promoter score (NPS) – the likelihood a customer will recommend your business
When it comes to content marketing, it is essential to make sure you are producing content that is valuable to your customers. To do this, you need to measure customer metrics and use that data to help guide your content marketing strategy.
By understanding what your customers want and need, you can produce content that meets their demands and that ultimately, helps you achieve your business goals.
Resonate With Potential Customers by Creating Personalized Content
Heard of the phrase, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time”? Much is true in content marketing – generalized or mass market content leads to poor conversion but targeted copy tends to perform better.
With targeted content, yes, you will put in a lot of time and effort in knowing your customers better – but the good thing is that it pays off!
By understanding your audience’s motivations and drivers, you can create content that speaks to them on a more intimate level that they can easily resonate with.
So, before you start drafting your next piece of content, take some time to understand your audience. It may just be the key to creating content that really hits home.
If you ever need help writing quality content fast, Copysmith can take care of the tedious and boring tasks from researching, brainstorming, editing and proofreading. Sign up now and start writing content that converts for free. Unlimited 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
P.S. Parts of this blog post were written by Copysmith’s Blog Kickstarter.