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”