Reach your target audience with promotional content
If you’re a digital marketing manager or an SEO professional looking to effectively target your audience, then it’s likely you considered starting a promotional content plan.
Promotional content, indeed, has been shown to be highly successful in driving engagement, increasing brand recognition, and turning potential customers into loyal, returning clients.
However, with so many different platforms and channels to choose from, it can take time to figure out how to use promotional content to successfully target your audience.
What should you take into account to craft content that resonates with your public?
How can you create a promotional content plan that successfully drives traffic and sales to your business?
Let’s go over 5 best practices to effectively target your audience with promotional content, from understanding your public and product to creating a campaign that adds value, and many more.
1. Define your target audience
Before creating any promotional content, it’s essential to clearly define your target audience.
Who are you trying to reach? What are their demographics, interests, and pain points?
Even if this may seem trivial to you, many businesses today still make the error of overlooking this practice.
Listing a bunch of goals and pains isn’t enough.
You need to clearly define your public by studying their deepest needs, desires, obstacles, and any solution they may have already tried that relates to your product.
It’s only by understanding your target audience that you can create content that successfully addresses them, and they may actually want to read.
To do so, the first step you should follow is conducting market research.
A deep, thorough analysis of your customers will provide you with communicative angles and topics, thus helping you to understand what to cover in your promotional content plan.
For instance, try to look at your current customer base and gather data about their demographics, desires, and interactions.
Your goal will be to find recurring observations, and eventually see if any pattern is present in your customers’ relations with your brand.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics to gather specific data on your website visitors.
Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you are a step ahead in creating content that speaks directly to them and that addresses their specific profiles.
It’s only by understanding your target audience that you can create content that successfully addresses them, and they may actually want to read.
2. Define your product
Understanding your product is as important as understanding your audience.
Clearly defining it includes focusing on your product’s unique features and benefits, which will be useful in creating promotional content that highlights them.
To do so, you can think of your offer as two different products:
- A physical product, made up of the mere characteristics of what you’re trying to sell;
- A functional product, made of all the ways that it can help your audience satisfy their desires and needs.
Both these aspects are useful for creating your promotional content.
First, by focusing on how your product benefits your audience (the functional product), you can create content that aligns with what your customers really care about.
An example of this may be how a phone with large internal storage may help your audience of music enthusiasts download all the songs they want.
Then, by mentioning your product characteristics (the physical product), you can address any eventual skepticism through demonstrations and raise trust among your potential customers.
For instance, consider the phone in the previous example.
You can use your product’s characteristics (let’s say, 500 GB internal storage) to demonstrate the benefits you just mentioned.
Focusing on both your product features and perks will ultimately help you create promotional content that can get your public interested in your offerings.
However, this can only be done by knowing your product inside and out, so make sure not to overlook this step.
3. Make a campaign that adds value to your target
Whatever the formats you’re going to choose for your campaigns, you should make sure your promotional content provides your audience with value.
Value, indeed, gives your public a reason to listen to your message – whether it’s reading a post, listening to a podcast, or watching a video on YouTube.
Dove’s iconic Real Beauty Sketches campaign is a popular example of this.
The video depicts an FBI-trained artist painting two portraits of different women: one based on their own descriptions, and the other using a stranger’s observations.
The campaign explores the gap between how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves, showing at the end how the two portraits look different from each other.
Real Beauty Sketches has amassed over 70 million views on YouTube, thus providing a huge boost in both brand awareness and brand positioning to the English brand.
By sharing valuable and entertaining content with the public, Dove has been able to increase its notoriety, create a positive image in their audience’s mind, and improve their overall reputation.
4. Create a community from your segmentation
Another way you can consider effectively targeting your audience with promotional content is by creating a community from your segmentation.
This can be done through social media groups, email lists, or other online platforms.
By creating a community, you can engage with your target audience on a more personal level and gather valuable feedback.
Such feedback can be used to improve your product and create more effective promotional content.
Additionally, creating a community can also help to build loyalty and trust with your target audience.
By consistently providing value and engaging with them, you can build a relationship that will lead to increased conversions and sales.
5. Build your brand awareness
Last but not least, here’s a counterintuitive point to keep in mind if you want to target your audience effectively with promotional content: increase your brand awareness.
Even if brand awareness will come as a consequence of a well-structured promotional content campaign, raising it beforehand through different practices can help your content have a higher impact on your public.
For instance, you may promote your material through guest posting, connecting with popular publishers in your niche to get them to host content that promotes your products and services.
With guest posting, your brand can amass a public in a short amount of time, thus helping you to increase the impact your content will have.
Avoid wasting money on your promotional content campaigns
If you’re looking to reach your public effectively through promotional content, creating high-quality material may not be enough.
It takes time to amass an audience from scratch – a factor that can limit your business’ growth over time and make you spend lots of money before even seeing the slightest result.
For sure you can create valuable content – but what does it matter if nobody sees it?
And advertising isn’t the solution, either.
Readers today have developed what scientists call banner blindness – they subconsciously ignore advertisements presented in traditional banner form.
Such negative premises have led marketers to rethink the way they can engage with their customers and to seek an alternative answer, which is why thousands of businesses every day choose Getfluence.
Getfluence is a global marketplace that offers access to over 10,000 premium publisher partners worldwide, such as Forbes and The Economist, to help enhance your brand’s positioning with long-lasting results.
Thanks to its user-friendly interface, Getfluence makes it easy to promote your content on relevant media in your industry, helping you effectively target your specific audience.
This leads to increased brand reach, improved rankings with high-quality backlinks, and enhanced trust in your business or project.
On top of that, Getfluence allows you to save money on each of your deals thanks to its competitive prices, directly pre-negotiated for you with top publishers.
Ready to build a successful promotional content campaign?
Target your audience effectively and save money now with Getfluence.
Most asked questions about promotional content
What is promotional content?
Promotional content is any kind of content through which your business can promote its product or services. Some common formats of promotional content include blog posts, podcasts, videos, and live branded events.
How does your content effectively target your audience?
You can effectively target your audience by creating content tailored to their deepest needs and desires. To do so, you should conduct a thorough analysis of your public, analyze how your products benefit them, and only share content that provides them with value.
How do you attract people to content?
To attract people to your content, you should make sure to give them reasons to do it. Your content shall always provide your public with valuable or engaging information, be tailored to their needs, and be oriented to match their interests and desires.
