Content Queen Mariah

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210: How to find WHO you are speaking to in your marketing with 3 simple steps

Mariah MacInnes

Think your product or service is for everyone? Sure, maybe it is... But if you don't find out exactly WHO it is for, it will be hard to market.

With these three simple steps, you will know who you are speaking to in your content (and marketing) in 2024!

This is all part of our new campaign - Around the World in 90 days - your ticket to good content marketing! 

Welcome aboard flight CQM222, I am your pilot, Mariah - you have your ticket to good content marketing in hand. 

While on this flight the flight attendants will be here to assist you to get off the content creation hamster wheel and onto a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom-based lifestyle. 

Each week you will be given a new stamp in your passport and by the end of the 90 days, you will be on your way to explore the world of Content Marketing as a solo traveller. 

This is week ten - get ready, it is going to be a wild ride! 

If you LOVED this part of your trip (the episode), make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

⁠⁠✨ ⁠⁠⁠⁠JOIN OUR CONTENT PLANNING WORKSHOP✨⁠⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • The 3 steps to find your target audience

  • How to use this information to market to your ideal client

  • What you need to get started

  • How to use this to create great content

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is your pilot speaking my name is Mariah and welcome to this special series of the content Queen podcast. You have boarded flight CQ M 222. And you have in your hand your ticket to good content marketing. We hope you have a safe journey on this 90 day trip strapping and get ready to experience all the strategy and learnings you need to enter 2024 with a direction on how you create content that is unique to you and your business.

While on board you have complimentary access to all the learnings that will help you to attract your own passengers to grow and expand your own trip. While on this flight, the flight attendants will be here to assist you get off the content creation hamster wheel and onto a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom based lifestyle.

Each week you'll be given a new stamp on your passport. By the end of the 90 days you'll be on your way to explore the world of content marketing as a solo traveler. Seatbelt in we are ready to take off.

Hello gang how are we? It's funny I did a tech talk the other day or didn't do one but I started tick tock of dog giving you like a teleprompter and you're like the flight attendant. And I think I know that from all of this flight enhancements on this on this special series. We're actually nearing the end we only have a couple episodes left of this 90 Day campaign. So I'd love to know what you think of it.

If you're on Spotify, there's a little comment section you can definitely share. But otherwise come over to Instagram and tell me or you can leave a rating review in if you're on Spotify. If you're on Apple, you can leave five stars you can leave a review I'd love to know what you think of this 90 Day series and what you'd like to see more of that would be amazing. So as we're coming towards the end, we have awesome things coming up to finalize the 90 Day campaign.

We had our first stop which was in Colombia and it was a workshop content in casa, if you are listening to this live it is in two days and I'll put the link in the show notes in case you want to join. Otherwise, if you're listening to this, you know after the fact it was you know, we had this house party it was all about helping you plan and execute two weeks of content.

Now the next part of the journey is our final destination and I'm so excited to announce that in the coming weeks. So that is going to happen in a week from now follow us on socials to find out all about it. We have amazing video campaigns coming out around it and I'm super excited to actually do a bit of a digest episode on this campaign which will probably happen in March but it'll be really fun to unpack this this episode. This series should I say in an episode and really share the learnings on this.

This 90 day trip and yeah, just I guess, share the learnings and hopefully help you with your own marketing campaigns in the future. So as you've probably noticed that I've done three solo episodes in a row I did have guests episodes lined up I've done some guest episodes. Everything's I was organized with the strategy but with the new workshop and everything and there was one change in an episode so it just so happened that those three in a row.

Thank you for staying around until it's just to me, but three episodes in a row and yeah, next week will be a next week is going to be a solo episode. So sorry. In total, there'll be three episodes of me in a row. And then we'll have a guest come on in a few weeks. But it all makes sense because I really there's so many important things to share in this 90 Day tech campaign, which I want to make sure you have the tools to really help you on this journey.

And as I mentioned, we have some super exciting things coming up so make sure you stay tuned. Now, this episode came to light, because well, I'd planned this a while ago but it's very interesting how things always come up when you know you're going to speak about them. I did some co-working last week or the week before immersion in Colombia.

It's a super cool co-working space like city and I was talking about marketing with a fellow marketer. Shout out to em. She's going to join the podcast in the future. And we're talking about marketing and because her partner is a programmer, and this was super interesting because I'm like, oh my god, it's just so many like totally different parts of the brain Rome, programming this marketing.

And she was saying yeah, I can't imagine because I use just such a different part of my brain. And whilst it's challenging, marketing can be super simple, you know, and the word that come up was connection. If you connect and understand your audience, then marketing is actually a lot simpler.

So this was a really interesting concept because then that night I had a I had a workshop that I did for the amazing Ashley Boston and her traffic Ads Mastery, membership all about Facebook ads, but she wanted me to come in and talk about content marketing, specifically storytelling. And storytelling has this beautiful power to create this connection. But even more so when we can relate to our audience, and we understand who they are.

So some super powerful conversations in the last few weeks that really speak to this episode, which is who are you speaking to in 2024? Do you actually know your audience and your target audience? Maybe you've done some work when you're doing your branding and you're doing all sorts of things, but do you revisit it because for content marketing, this is really interesting. And this is something that I want you to understand from this episode. Who you speak to in your content could be just one of your target audiences.

For example, for me, on my social media, this podcast, I speak to the people that want to learn and I speak to the small business owners and entrepreneurs that might not be ready to outsource just yet. They might be in that phase where they just want to learn about you know, social media content, marketing content strategy, and start to understand what that means for their business and if it's worth while and worth investing in the future so this is a really case, space write a test space.

So you learn Yes, you might do content bootcamp, you might join one of my workshops, you might test and Tanya Oh, this is actually got merit. But I feel like I need to outsource it because I there's so much more I could do with it. So then that's when you invest more money. into it. Then if it doesn't really work out for you in terms of just don't get wrong, you're not gonna see traction straightaway, but you start, you know, you don't see any traction.

It's just not working out for you, then you can go okay, well, it's not really something I'm going to outsource. It might be something actually that I cut back on because I don't really need to be active with content all the time. So my content on Instagram, social media is for those people. And yes, I might get people that come through and want to work with me straightaway or want to, you know, hire me as a content marketer.

But, baby like, that's not who I'm like directly targeting because those people I would target through networking, word of mouth, those sorts of marketing strategies. So it's very interesting how, when we understand our target audience better we can then filter through who we're actually creating content for. Because that can be very different. And also in different spaces in our business.

You know, we might be looking at, okay, well, if for this campaign, we're just targeting this type of audience. For that certain campaign or certain time of year we're going to target this certain audience now this was a really interesting story as well that came up when I was doing a lot of workshops and something that I share. I had a salon owner who does beauty and all sorts of different sales products, everything they said to me.

I'm not really sure who to who I'm speaking to, because it could be anybody, right? Like, someone could come in and get a facial and the other person can come in and get a wax. Now, this was an interesting concept, because I said to her, who is your best customer, who is the one that continues to repeat buy books in straightaway? You understand like, you know, you know, their family dynamic, you're good, like you're friendly with them, you love them coming in, versus you know, the person that might come in once and then never rebook.

That's the person you want to target because they're the people that you want to attract. Because we do want to attract the people that we want to work with as well. So it actually doesn't matter about the service that they're booking. It matters about the type of person that they are and if you for example, know that you know that woman that comes in every two weeks and gets a wax or a mani pedi whatever, you know that she is a certain age, you know that she loves a certain TV show, you know, like kind of the dynamics of that person, you can start to create content for that specific person to attract more of them.

And that was the lightbulb moment that she needed to understand who she markets to, versus all the people that could come in and buy from her. You know, she might get mail she might get but it doesn't mean that you won't attract those people.

If you niche your marketing, Interesting concept can be scary, but hear me out because we're going to understand this person a lot more with three things that you can do right after this episode to start to understand them. So when you know you are speaking with like the exact human, then you have a better chance of making a connection with them. Right.

So how do we do that? What do we need? I'm going to share three things you can do, again, as I mentioned, to find out who this person is. Right? The first like before you do that, though, I want you to think about these questions that I've asked before. You know who where most of your leads come from? And who is your best customer? So think about these two things whilst you are doing this sort of audience research. And this is a module completely dedicated in content bootcamp where you go into in detail and I give all the resources and we go through it together.

But basically, you want that you don't just want to target anybody, because that's when you start to get you know, those painful clients like there's a whole like we will have whole dedicated Tiktok channels like salon owners, you know, hairdressers beauticians that share stories of not just their experiences, but bad experiences from customers that they've had. We can all remember having a bad client, a bad customer, it happens to all of us.

So that's why we want to be intentional with our marketing. So we're not attracting the wrong person for us. So they're not you know, we want the people that resonate with us that gel well with us that like us as well. You know, like we want to we want the person to like us, not everyone's gonna like us. So that's why we want to market to the people that will.

So the first thing you want to look at is audience demographics of the current channels that you aren't showing up on. So this is an exercise I do every year I go through my Instagram, my website, my podcasts, my you know, like the ones that tell us the demographics, email marketing is not so much unless we go next level into every profile that basically you want to mark out the age group the like the top trending age group or the top that where the top you know the most amount of people are the the agenda the like place they're at the times of day like on Instagram you can see when they're most active.

That's a stat that all it'll tell you in Instagram. On your website. Yes, the country they're coming from the platform they're using, like, are they using desktop? Are they using mobile? You might be like, Why do I need to know these things? These things are super important because when you're starting to create stories and content like you're not gonna say, Oh, you're scrolling on your laptop late at night? No, no, you're gonna say you might be watching The Bachelor. You're scrolling on your phone, like you're actually like, Oh my God, that's what I'm doing right now.

You know, that's when you can start to understand all lots of people look on their mobile app. So I need to be talking about their phones and I also need to be creating content that's mobile friendly. Making sure my website is mobile, friendly, all those things. That's why I like when I look at the stats, I know a lot of you are on that. Listen to this podcast, or on iPhone. So I know you're using Apple podcasts because that's also the top one so I know I can say you can leave a rate review because you're on Apple. So you start to learn these things about your audience.

I had an awesome example with a client. I was looking at her demographics because I do that every year. And here are some interesting things that I noticed. A lot of people were listening to her through their Alexa, their their home device, right. So I said to her, this is something you can start to mention in your podcasts.

For example, right now you might be listening to me through your headphones through your, you know, Alexa device, cooking dinner, because that to me suggests that people are doing something whilst listening to her. So I said you can use this in your content while you're recording your podcast. Genius, right? And then they go oh my god, how does she know me? Trust connection. Right. There's also something interesting that we can learn.

Okay, the countries if I noticed that in one year, there's a new demographic on one channel but not on the others we can start to work out why. And I could build out this little plan for for her podcast that is now more aligned to the audience that is listening. So you start to understand why these things are important. And why you should do these at least every 12 months, if not every six or three months.

Start to understand the demographics. So that's the first demographics a really high level specific, like roundabout age and also, you know, things I've noticed, you know, one of my clients, she's starting to get a more older demographic. So then we can start talking about okay, older women in business, what is probably more of their pain point. Maybe they're just starting out because they want to build something for their children's future. Maybe they want to spend more time with their children. Maybe you know, they've maybe even they've lost their mojo in their business have been in business for a few years and they're just like feeling a little bit lost. So then we can start to test content to see what works right. Super cool.

So once we've looked at that audience demographic and written down in southern making a few assumptions, we want to then go out and probably look at doing some market research. So this could be anything from jumping on a call with previous clients or people that you know, are interested in your services, just asking them you know, people do these exchanges, I'll offer you you know, a 30 minute like, coaching session or I can offer you something for in exchange for a phone call. Or otherwise you can fill out make a form through Google Forms. And you can send out your email list and ask them questions.

I had a client before I even started working with them. We were doing some mentoring sessions and I got her to send something out. And those questions then helped us build out a marketing campaign with the topics of the main pain points. And we can now start to talk to these, you know, pain points and dream ideal life based on what we learned from filling just sending this form out via email marketing.

We did two emails and a couple social media posts, and her audience was quite engaged, and we got a lot of great feedback. So think about before, you know, getting into really building out a strategy. Let's look at the market research. And let's talk to people and start to understand, maybe you might have a couple of offers and a couple of clients that have joined you might say hey, do you mind answering these few questions is what made you join and what you connected with? What you're experiencing all these things.

So you start to understand why they joined, what resonated with them, and really talking about the program. It's talking about the marketing of that program and why they joined so the second one market research, if you have some space, I highly recommend you start doing some.

And then the third thing is audience persona. So once you've got those demographics filled out this is more of the psychographic so You might be thinking okay, what is the difference? If I do a quick Google search, demographics is really that statistical data, age, gender, where they're from all those things.

So the demographics, the psychographics is really about their goals, their aspirations, their attitude, you know, things that they want in their lives, right? Things that they're looking for, they're their pain points, their problems, and then what they want in their life, their behaviors, all these things that we can start to map out. Now this will come a lot from that market research if you ask the right questions.

And if you would like some support on that, I've got a link in the show notes to a blog. That shares a little bit more about market research. But basically, you want to be asking the right questions so you can learn more about them. But this is where we start to create that like persona about that person.

A Day in the Life a diary entry we start building out like a table of all the things we know about our target audience, the fact that they watch The Bachelor, the fact that their dream is to spend more time with their family or to travel that they you know, their pain point is they don't have enough time. I mean, I think times the pain point for everyone. Or specifically, they don't have enough time to spend with their families.

So this is where we can start to understand and build more marketing more specific marketing messages around our audience because we know this now you're like, Well, how do I know if they watch The Bachelor? How do I know? This is where you start to use the people that have already purchased from you. You know, maybe you've had conversations with your clients, what are the conversations you have with your clients? You know, for me a lot is travel a lot is spare time.

Whenever I talk with my clients, we're always talking about, you know what we do with our free time what we love and a lot of it is travel spending time with family. And I know one of the biggest transformations that I give my clients from a retainer, like working with us one on one perspective, is the freedom and the more time they have because they've outsource things, right so I can talk to that right I can share those things and that my whole, like, third part of this around the world in 80 Days campaign is talking to that.

So watch it, see how I've done it. But really this is about building out the pain points, the goals, the behaviors. And if you are on my email list, you will be getting an email with a really awesome target audience guide that will help you and it's going to be for free.

So join the mailing list if you're not and it will be coming out on Thursday. If you're listening to this after the fact send me a message and sign up to the email list and I'll I'll flick it through to you. But basically, you just want to start to understand more and then journal this person journal A Day in the Life give them a name.

The name should probably be a previous client, someone that you've worked with before the clients that do this the best have names and like just know them to the absolute detail. And a lot of this is building out from based on assumptions. You test things. If that didn't resonate, you move on to something else. And that's why you're always tweaking this target audience persona.

So then when you start to create content, you're always thinking about this person from the demographics, the things I've told you through market research and the day in the life that you know they have. It's super, super powerful to do this work. And if you haven't, it's the next thing on your list before you start posting any more things because you want to be posting to that specific person and then see who you attract after that.

See who you attract, you know who do this very well. influences. You know why? Because they're so connected to their audience because their audience are their biggest buyers in terms of their selling direct product. And generally their audience is them in either like, you know, a different stage of their life or you know, before they became an influencer so they know their audience so well.

If you spend more time on understanding your audience, the marketing and the content creation becomes easier if you created your product or service to be like because it was a pain point you experienced five years ago, go back to that person five years ago and understand.

Start creating content for that person. Be more relatable. Unfortunately now because, you know, there's so much jargon and especially in the marketing space, a lot of marketers don't talk to their audience properly because they're talking a lot of jargon to sound like an expert and they totally are, but unfortunately, people don't understand. So you do have to simplify things and go back.

So, after this episode, look at your audience demographics on the channels you're currently showing up on. Do some market research, either jump on a call with a couple people or send out some forms to your current following email list whatever, and then build an audience persona journal. on them and start creating content from that person. Even good copywriters.

We can learn a lot from good copywriters because they interview the client of the person that they're working with right? Then they take copy and words that they said and use it in the content in their exact language. So that's what you want to start doing speak like your audience. be relatable to your audience.

Super interesting before we wrap up this episode, is I do a quarterly workshop for anyone in my membership, the dry content marketing club, or anyone that joins content, bootcamp gets access to this every three months. It's super cool, right?

Like I think that's a really good offering because what we do is they then get a chance to ask me any questions but we jump on a call. We look at the stats as a group of us. We go through and we learn things and then we tweak the strategy based on what we learned because measurement is a very important part of marketing. And I had someone joined that was part of content bootcamp. And they hadn't done any of this work before.

So I took her through it sure to everything. And she was like, oh my god, the content that's really relatable to business owners is getting a lot of engagement and traction, because she was being relatable. I said it's because you understood your audience there.

So then she knew that that was the content that works and she could continue that. But the important message in there is she understood the audience she was speaking to and that's why it resonated. And I imagine if you go back over any of your old content, things that might have resonated more than others were times where you connected with your audience and understood them more.

So I want you to do that exci and you don't have to spend hours on it. Just like we can definitely the more time we spend on it, the better but get something down. Start creating content from there, learn and iterate the more you learn about your audience. Right. And if you do that exercise before the workshop that I have, and you want to join God, it's gonna make it so much easier as well.

Let me know if have any questions about that. I'm super excited to see what comes out of it. And don't get me wrong. We're all the same, like don't feel bad. I'm the same. I need to do this work all the time because sometimes we can start to lose sight of our audience.

When we're getting all excited in the content creation process. But go back always think about that one person that you are speaking to, in your content one person that's it easier to speak to one person than to hundreds. Speak to that one person and be your content queen or king and remember the developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today on this fight stamp your passport and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. I know some of you are doing it because some of that during my podcasts like my friend shared the episode My your podcast with me. So thank you for that. So I know you are sharing it. So please continue to share it.

Don't forget to tag me on Instagram at content Queen Mariah or you can tell them about it. And if you do leave a rate and review it does allow me to get guests on. For example, the person that shared that podcast with their friend is also an expert in the space of marketing who's going to join the show very soon. So the more people that hear about this and the higher we are in the chat, the more quality guests that we get on like we've had the all these people have found me through finding my podcast online because I was in the charts.

So leave a rating review if you haven't, and follow us on Instagram and Tiktok and let me know if there's any topics you want me to talk about in the future. And I'd love to hear from you. And I'd love to hear how you go doing your target audience research. Tell me who that person is. Tell me I want to know exact names, age everything. Be specific and talk to that person and I will talk to you next week.

Bye!

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