Episode Summary
Content marketing is a strategy to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. And if you want to stand out from the competition, you can create branded content that helps illustrate your company’s point of view and evokes an emotional response from your audience.
But you need to know your audience for this strategy to succeed. If you don’t understand your ICP and audience, you won’t know how to go to market and how to build a better product. So, you need to know what your audience wants from your product and content.
In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro. Amanda explains how you can create a successful content brand. Amanda and Camille discuss audience research, the ways to do it, and its benefits for the marketing team.
Guest Profile
- Name: Amanda Natividad
- What she does: Amanda is the VP of Marketing at SparkToro.
- Company: SparkToro
- Noteworthy: Amanda got her start in marketing at NatureBox. She also led marketing for Growth Machine and Liftopia; before that, she helped build Fitbit's B2B marketing team. Amanda is currently the VP of Marketing at SparkToro, an audience research startup. In addition, she's a contributor for Adweek, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a former journalist.
Key Insights
- Don’t make assumptions when it comes to marketing. A content brand is a brand you love and recommend for its content, even though you may not be using their product. But if you want to create a content brand, you should do audience research first. Amanda explains why most content fails and where people go wrong with audience research. "The mistake people make is that we assume that we know what we don't actually know, and we assume that once we know, or once we do the research, that it doesn't change, that we've got it. We're like, 'Got it, I'm all set. We're good for the next five years,' when no, you're not."
- The importance of diversity in audience research. Audience research is designed to determine the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals who are or could be potential customers (your target audience). And for audience research to be successful, you need to ensure you're not going by your perceptions of the audience. According to Amanda, making sure your information intake is full of different people and voices is very important. "It's making sure that my feed is made up of people who are in all kinds of marketing teams, from small in-house teams to larger agencies to consultants to people who are basically marketing analysts or marketing coordinators and all the way up to VP. And just understanding or seeing how people are talking about their problems, which problems they're facing, the language they use to describe it — that's the main thing. […] Aside from that, it's also keeping a good pulse on the things they pay attention to, their sources of influence. Like, if my feed is full of marketing coordinators, content marketing managers, directors of marketing, then I'm curious, 'What podcasts are they probably listening to, or are at least influenced by?'"
- Research the audience from the macro to the micro level. You can access and research your audience in several ways, using different platforms and tools like Hotjar, SurveyMonkey, and SparkToro. Amanda points out that you don't even need to use SparkToro because audience research is a combination of industry trend monitoring and social monitoring, and she suggests that research be done from the macro to the micro level. "At the macro level, you have overall category or industry trends. And there are a lot of really good free resources, like Google Trends; it's still really good for this. I really like Exploding Topics; I even just like the digest they send because it makes me very curious about all of these topics that are taking off. I think that's super interesting to read. For instance, there are a lot of skincare products that have become exploding topics in the recent two to five years, and Exploding Topics will show how the explosion has occurred, I think, as far back as ten years. I think they use Google Trends to power a lot of their data. So that's pretty cool to look at. And then, on the micro level you have, like, what your audience reads, what they listen to — what your audience is consuming basically. So, that's where you have the podcast, magazines, newsletters, and so forth."
Episode Highlights
Use Cases for Audience Research
“One use case that’ll be helpful for people — because this is helpful whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or creator or a larger marketing team — is using audience research to understand how to build your content strategy. And you think about an overall content strategy; keyword research can, and in many cases should be, part of that strategy. Understanding, like, ‘What are the things people are searching for?’ Sure, totally reasonable that that’s part of the strategy. When you think about an overall content marketing strategy or a content strategy, then you should be thinking about things like the shared language in your audience. Like, how do people describe things? You should be thinking about ways in which you might get your content distributed. And if you’re thinking about the distribution of content, then you’re also going to be thinking about, ‘Which communities do they frequent? Which social accounts do they follow? What publications do they read that I might be able to pitch myself as a guest contributor for, and thus get the word out on my content or what it is that I do?'”
Audience Research Affects the Entire Ecosystem
“Audience research is fitting into various touchpoints in a buyer’s or audience member’s journey. Sure there’s a top of the funnel, like content creation, but there’s also a way to approach it where you can use audience research — where you find where the audience frequents, things that they’re influenced by — and then consider how you can do some sponsorships there and more targeted sponsorships, where instead of throwing money at Facebook Ads to hopefully drive some top-of-funnel conversion, what you can do is hopefully find some influential newsletters or substacks where people might only have 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, but they’re known well within their niche or among their given audience. And if you can sponsor some of these smaller channels, one, it costs a lot less money than paying for ad placement in Morning Brew — that’s super expensive. But you can find these smaller arbitrage opportunities. And two, it’s nice to be able to support kind of an up-and-coming creator. […] I would also think about audience research for how you continue to engage your customers or maybe existing audiences. And I think webinars/events are a good way to do this.”
The Benefits of Audience Research for the Marketing Team
“The savviest content marketers are going to be doing audience researcdoing ah, whether or not this is a formally codified thing the way SEO is, which I don’t think it will be. Whether or not they use SparkToro, they can use something else. You can do audience research in any way you want to. But the savviest content marketers who do this are going to be able to make their whole marketing team or their marketing operations a lot more sustainable. Because in doing the audience research — even if your purpose is content marketing, like, you’re a content marketing manager who is creating content, naturally — you’ll uncover the opportunities that aren’t just content. You’ll uncover the digital PR opportunities, other co-marketing, guest placement opportunities, or the sort of demand generation piece, the sponsorships. Those are the things that the smartest content marketers will start to uncover, and it’ll help the whole team operate in a more sustainable and even just a healthier way.”
