How Can You Align Content to Your Audience?

Craig Brown (00:02)
Normally the biggest pushback on all these things is we don't have the resources to produce all of this. It's like, okay, but we don't need to produce all of it. look at where the audience is and go there first.

Benjamin Ard (00:38)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Craig. Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig Brown (00:43)
Thank you Ben, I appreciate it.

Benjamin Ard (00:45)
Craig, I'm excited for today's episode. You have some great stories to share about how you've done this, but before we dive into that, let's get to know you. Tell us about yourself and your career.

Craig Brown (00:54)
Yeah, thank you. So I'm Craig Brown. I'm currently VP of Marketing at Connect Homes, we're a prefab building company. I've been there about 18 months and prior to that, I spent a decade in the agency world, started in paid search, ended up running all paid media and actually moved from the UK to the US to completely rebuild our immediate team. I've done it both sides of the pond, which is a nice way to do things. It's very different and also the same.

You know, people are people.

Benjamin Ard (01:21)
I love it, I love it. And one of our favorite questions, what do you love about content and marketing?

Craig Brown (01:26)
It's a broad question. As many of us, I got kicked into this sort of post-college as a way to make some money. I think I fell in love with marketing and content because I like telling stories and I like stories. And I think that's what marketing is, is it's telling stories in a way that changes people's behavior. And I think someone from paid search, I'll probably say content doesn't matter. It's just about the actual audience and the data and all of that sort of things.

It's so untrue. think the best brands do it in the best ways, which is tell the right story and get the right content in front of people. And I think that's honestly where someone who has very few creative bones in their body, I think that's what I love is actually identifying what those stories can be and how to get them in front of the right people.

Benjamin Ard (02:11)
I love it. That's amazing. So Craig, we were talking a little bit beforehand in today's episode, we're going to focus on aligning content to your audience. Now, a lot of times we may not have the perfect messaging and it's difficult and we may just have one message that we share with everyone. Why does this matter? Why should we align specific content to specific people? It may sound self-explanatory, but I'd to kind of hear your definition of why we need to do that.

Craig Brown (02:36)
Yeah, I think it's a good question. It's something that I've worked on a lot, particularly at Connect Homes, but more recently in general with brands, which is we are so inundated with messages these days of marketing and particularly with the rise of social media. And if you look at what particularly TikTok and Instagram are doing with things and the amount that we see influence and marketing growth, that's still marketing. Even if it's not paid for, everyone is trying to

push certain things and drive affiliate links. And so the amount of information we are receiving on products all the time is just insane. A lot of that content is personalized. Again, say what you want about TikTok and Instagram. There are huge pluses and minuses. Their algorithms are insane and we've all lost hours and hours of just going down rabbit holes on whatever your preferred subject might be. The reason is, is because it's so relevant to you and hits on.

your life, your pain points, your interests, whatever it might be. Brands fall down if they don't do that because we receive so much relevant information every day. If we're not receiving relevant information from the brands that we should be interested in, we're just gonna completely ignore it. And I think that's the thing. It's cutting through that clutter and the only way to do that is for it to be very relevant and speak to that person.

Benjamin Ard (03:52)
I love that. Yeah, that's amazing. And as a consumer, it's something I appreciate as well. You know, obviously, like you said.

Craig Brown (03:56)
Yeah, and I think that's

the other thing that we have to remember is like marketing only works if we're giving the consumer what they want. Like all business only works. Business only works if you have something consumers want. So marketing's the same. We need to make sure we're getting that message across of why do you want this or why do you need this? Well, let's be honest, even if we don't need it most of the time, why do we think we should need it?

Benjamin Ard (04:18)
Yeah, no, that's a great point. I love that caveat. So if I'm at a business and I'm looking at it and saying, okay, I need more relevant content. Where do I start? What do I do? How do I like really understand that process? What have you gone through to really nail that down?

Craig Brown (04:34)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think aligning your content is all about understanding who your audience is. So best place to start is Google Analytics or whatever your analytics platform is. They much audience information in there. If you go and look at the in-market and affinity audience pieces, it will tell you where that traffic is coming from and how Google is classifying those people.

And that's a great place to start because it will tell you what affinity they have for certain types of cars, certain types of interests, movies and films, or what type of news channels they're gonna be interested in, that type of stuff. It's just gonna start to give you a very top line level. It's also gonna break down the demographics for you. So you've got your gender split, you've got your age split. So that's a good place to start. Also do the same with your CRM as well. You're gonna have hopefully most of that information in your CRM.

The other thing that you can do is take those lists out of your CRM. If you don't have age, gender, and you've got a very basic set up, take those out and put those into something like a Google Analytics or a Meta, or there's many areas that you can do these CRM uploads in that will give you a bit of an audience analysis. And again, start breaking down those splits. Meta obviously has the breakdown of who likes your pages and who follows your content. So I think really that's the first thing is start doing that.

Every brand likes to think they have their target audience. Particularly in the startup world, what you often find is who you think your audience might be isn't necessarily who your audience ends up being. And it's really important to make sure that you do understand who that is. If you think your audience is gonna be 30 to 40 and they actually end up being 50 to 60, the way you need to position your brand is gonna be so different. Now that's obviously a very basic sort of inference, but it...

it does make a big difference and you do need to just understand who it is. And I think the good thing about marketing is we have so much of that information. It's been one of the huge transitions to going online. Most of this data is now available for free and very easy. You don't have to go and run huge surveys. You don't have to go and do polls or anything like that. It's there in interfaces that you probably have already set up and engaged with.

Benjamin Ard (06:45)
I love it. So when you're doing that research, are you like setting up very specific personas? What does like a persona look like for you as you're doing that research and how does that then drive the content you're creating?

Craig Brown (06:55)
Yeah, I guess.

I think that that is a really interesting one. We've all seen these audience things where there is, you know, this persona and it gets some crazy name and all of this stuff. It's not a bad way to go, particularly if you're trying to sell in execs higher up. Honestly, it's not something I worry about. honestly look more at age, gender. Household income is always a huge one because it's sort of gonna dictate how much you should talk about price point and whether that's important and I think.

Let's be honest, we're all costs concerned at some point, no matter what we're buying. That doesn't matter if it's B2C and you're buying something personal. It doesn't matter if that's B2B. Cost is always gonna factor into people's decisions. How much that is gonna factor in is also important. think the other thing to do is understand how expensive you are and where you're actually gonna fit in a population as well.

If you know that you're some people who only own like 150 to 200 K are going to be able to afford your product, whatever that might be, you sort of know that it's going to limit your market size. And I think I would focus more on that rather than the names is what is the market size that I can go after and what's available. And that's another important thing. And I think census data is always good for this type of stuff. Just to give you a rough sense check is

Okay, you do really well in, let's say California. okay, how many 50 to 60 year olds are there in California? And how many sales have we made the last 12 months? How much of that population have we hit? If you're under 5%, maybe keep doing what you're doing, but just expand your marketing and drive down the same content theme. Or you can look at expanding states, or if you look at the US in a totality and like, look, I've hit sort of 20 ish to 30 % of this audience.

You can chase that up a bit, but maybe it is time to start expanding out and looking at those new demographics or new persona profiles, whatever that might be. Understand where your product aligns potentially in what is another sizeable audience. And then start thinking about what your problems your product solves. Because that's ultimately, as we talked about earlier, how you need to push things is what is the pain point that your product is gonna solve? And therefore, how do you grow that?

we talked a bit about B2B earlier. That's the best example is people being like, we need to drive growth. And it's like in the B2B space, particularly if you have a very niche product and you can get up and you're the only one in the space, you can get up to 70 to 80 to 90 % of businesses in that space. I worked with a software company and they targeted like lumber mills and they hit 90 % of lumber mills in the US and they use this product and they're like, we need to grow.

some point there's only so much growth you can do in that market and then you've got to go and try and do something else. That like last final push from the 90 to 100 percent you'll see it in brand search like it's just too expensive to get that last bit and you need to start diversifying.

Benjamin Ard (09:52)
Yeah, I love that. So once we have our personas and understand their needs, I love how you talked about like that. What's their problems? What do they actually need to have solved? How are you distributing contents on different channels in such a way that the different audiences are getting the right messages as opposed to like the blanket blasts of like this is a brand message to everyone?

Craig Brown (10:11)
Yeah.

And I think that's another good example. When you're looking at media planning, ignore the message that you're going to say for a bit. like, where are these people? Like, if it's the 50 to 60 year olds, you're probably looking at leading much more heavily into like meta and Facebook and email versus if you go for 20 to 30 year olds, it is going to be more the Instagram, the TikToks. Email probably isn't as much of thing. How do you reach those people? YouTube.

It's gonna be much more video content because that's how they engage with things. You're going after an older audience, you can probably do more written content because it's what they're used to. It doesn't mean that the video content doesn't work. It just means you can build that in. Realistically, if you're going after a much younger demographic, you probably don't even bother with the written content because it's gonna be so difficult to get it out there. So I think that's a big thing is it's a understand where that audience is gonna be because the...

Normally the biggest pushback on all these things is we don't have the resources to produce all of this. It's like, okay, but we don't need to produce all of it. Let's look at where the audience is and go there first.

I'd always push something like social first because it's the easiest place to get multiple messages out there. It's not easy to sit down and go, this is the exact message in the exact format that's gonna work.

So I think if you go out and do it digitally, it allows you to learn and react significantly faster. I think email is an interesting one. I believe that you have so much control to change behavior with email and it's a very qualified audience as well. They've already engaged with you somehow. They've already given you their information and you already have a quote unquote free like touch point with them. Well, yes, email platforms cost something, but you've done the acquisition work. They're there.

It's such a slow learning process for most brands who don't have millions and millions and can segment their CRM into multiple ways and put different people in different streams that you need to go and learn in a different arena first before going and tailoring your emails. So I think on that, it is just about where is that audience going to be and where can we learn about messages the fastest.

Benjamin Ard (12:07)
Love it.

I love it. And these episodes go by quick. We're almost out of time. So one more question, Craig. You told me beforehand, you are really into data and analytics. That's kind of your background. You even studied genetics. Is that right? And at university and so when you look at data and it comes to content marketing and it doesn't have to be specific to personas or any of that kind of stuff we talked about before.

Craig Brown (12:18)
Okay.

Yes. Yep.

Benjamin Ard (12:38)
What data points do you look for that mean the most that you have latched onto that you feel like are really helpful for marketers to pay attention to?

Craig Brown (12:47)
Yeah, I think anything to do with engagement, whether that's click through rates, whether it's open rates, whether it's view through rates, whether it's view time, just like are people engaged? Because it doesn't matter where you are in the funnel, whether you're trying to drive branding, whether you're trying to sales, if people aren't engaged in the content, it is completely irrelevant what the next metric is. So that will always be the first place I look.

is what are those engagement metrics? And then it really is gonna work through a funnel process. Like if you were trying to drive a lot of sales from a piece of content, like email is a great one, open rates are wonderful, getting people through to your site is even better, but realistically, once they're already there, you're trying to drive repeat purchase or a first time purchase or trying to drive that action. So I think like the sales part is a huge part of it, but I think...

Benjamin Ard (13:33)
I love that.

Craig Brown (13:37)
We all get so caught up, everyone's like, everything's trackable, it's all performance. It's like, ultimately marketing is about telling stories to change behavior. Behaviors change slowly. So it's about ensuring there is that engagement. If people are engaging, the sales will come eventually. And I think we also need to bear in mind that because behavior changes slowly, you have to give time.

Benjamin Ard (13:47)
Hmm.

Craig Brown (13:58)
for things to actually funnel

Like TikTok is a great example. If you are running loads of stuff on TikTok, that's not going to drive immediate sales. What you can start tracking though is like if you only run TikTok in a single state, for example, to start off with, start looking at the change of the amount of traffic in relation to everything else coming through. So I also think that's important. It's important to understand where you're running these things and start tracking that website or sales behavior at a different.

level based on particularly geos. Geos is a great way to do it and just look at how they change. But I think that's always the data I look at is how is engagement changing? And ultimately, I don't care whether that's direct sales or direct actions, are those action metrics starting to change? And then you need to just tie that back to what you've put out there, which is different.

Benjamin Ard (14:47)
I love that. That's amazing. mean, a couple of things I just want to double click on. I love that you're talking about using specific geographic areas to do message testing to say, okay, we know that there's not like a direct line to track this, you know, whether it's branded search or website tracking from that, but we can tell if it's latching on. I love that you're focused on engagement rates. Are people actually consuming the content? Are they believing in the message? Things like that. This is amazing.

Craig Brown (15:02)
Yes.

Benjamin Ard (15:12)
Craig, I have learned a ton. I have loved this conversation. This is amazing. If anyone wants to reach out and continue the conversation online, how and where can they find you?

Craig Brown (15:21)
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. It's Craig Brown. I think that's probably the best place to reach me, honestly. I'm very bad at marketing myself. Love doing it for brands, not great myself, but I think, just find me on LinkedIn and I'm on it a lot. So I'm always happy to engage, always happy to have a conversation with people.

Benjamin Ard (15:37)
I love it. And for anyone listening, we will link to Craig's LinkedIn profile below. So just click on the link there. Again, Craig, thank you so much for the time and insights today.

Craig Brown (15:46)
Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate having me on.

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