An Audience-First Approach to Content Strategy

When it comes to developing training content, it’s not unusual to find that resources are created in a one-off manner and that a broader strategy around what content is created, and for whom, is missing.

So how can you build an amazing content strategy that truly addresses your audience’s needs? The first step is to form a deep understanding of your audience and their needs.

Identifying Your Audience

Before you even consider the topics you’d like to cover in your content, think about who you are targeting with your content and what they are most likely to be interested in learning. To get you started, we’ve shared a few potential audience characteristics to think about:

Customer or Prospect: If your target audience is customers or prospects, think about what their level of familiarity is with your product. Prospects will have little to no product knowledge while existing customers are likely comfortable with the basics of how your product works. With this experience as a starting point, think about what topics would be most valuable to your audience? Is it Customer Education theory? Best practices? Benchmarks? Other customer examples?

Seniority: Your target audience’s seniority level should also be factored into your content strategy. Senior leadership (c-suite or other executives) are more likely to be more interested in overarching topics and trends, while the day-to-day practitioners are likely seeking out tactical recommendations and how-tos.

Level of Involvement: Another audience characteristic to keep in mind is how frequently they use your product. Are they power users who use your product every day, or are they more passive learners who only need cursory knowledge to complete one-off tasks? As with seniority level, expected involvement helps define how tactical (or not) your content should be.

We’ll dig into best practices about how your target audience should inform your content strategy in our upcoming live webinar with TechSmith. Have you registered yet?