Copy that resonates requires knowing your audience—intimately. How are you doing with that?
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC
Audience understanding in content marketing is the practice of developing specific, research-grounded knowledge of who your target readers or customers are—their challenges, motivations, behaviors, and preferences—and using that knowledge to create content that resonates precisely rather than broadly. It is widely considered the foundational competency of effective content strategy: content that doesn’t know who it’s for cannot connect with anyone in particular.
Every day, without fail, two very different kinds of content appears in my inbox and on the various social media channels I follow.
One kind captures my attention and gets me to start reading, sometimes dragging me down a rabbit hole that I really wish I hadn’t been dragged down…
The other kind: meh. Generic, boilerplate, trite. Copy that literally any brand could have created. It’s not personal. It’s not specific. It doesn’t speak to me.
The difference between those two experiences has nothing to do with budget, production value, or even writing skill. It comes down to one thing: how well the brand actually knows its audience.
This is not a new principle.
Continue reading “The 2026 Content Marketing Imperative: Know Your Audience”
In a digital world, traditional communication skills are in high demand
If you’re not on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites —and believe it or not, many people are not!—you may be missing out on some very important conversations. Some of these conversations may be about you!
Sometimes it can be the smallest of things that leads to a lost opportunity from a marketing or sales perspective. Small things that can, I think, be easily corrected.
Identifying the key benefits that answer the question of WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?”) for your customers and prospects, the first step in writing compelling copy. The second is positioning what you have to offer relative to what your competition has to offer.
Over the years I’ve noticed a dangerous tendency—among myself and others—to assume that we “know” our customers, or target customers. Because we think or believe something, we assume that—of course!—others think or believe as we do. They don’t.
