In marketing, a similar technique is used to define our ideal customer: the buyer persona.
Another traditional tool has been the in-depth interview, in which an interviewer interacts with a person to analyze his or her views on a given topic or product.
All these tools seek to discover behavioral patterns that can be exploited for a marketing campaign or product launch.
Discovering insights
With the above techniques, we will be able to obtain data that can help us create our profiles. However, in human groups, valuable information lies both in what they say and in what they keep quiet about.
Although there is no precise definition of insight, we can consider that insights are the emotional part of a person’s opinions.
According to Thrieve, there are five stages in determining an insight:
- Establish context. It tries to determine a person’s behavior in a given situation, what he thinks, what he feels and, above all, what he does or what he is trying to achieve.
- Communicate the dilemma. It tries to determine a person’s barriers to achieving an accomplishment. It makes people’s tensions and frustrations explicit, and is the source of opportunities if we are able to break down these barriers.
- Articulate the why: Why do things happen the way they do? This is what we need to determine from a person’s behavior toward a given product and will help us determine how we can help them.
- Capture motivation. It determines the circumstances why people act in a certain way and allows us to assess stresses from different points of view: psychological, emotional, cognitive or environmental. Discovering these motivations will help us to eliminate frustrations.
- What is the ideal situation that the subject desires? What does a customer want our product to do and how will it do it? The answers to these questions will help us design the ideal product for our customer.
Why should we do this work?
When we design a content marketing strategy, our main objective is based on empathizing with the people we are targeting.
Without that knowledge, it is very difficult to create content that “engages” with the people we are targeting: our audiences.
Any piece we develop must comply with this premise. But we must also consider the channel through which we are going to distribute it or even the most appropriate moments to reach the audience.
We must also consider that audiences are not stable. Certain fashions or trends can change the behavior of our audiences. For this reason, the analysis work must be reviewed periodically.
A new model for determining audiences
We have already talked about classic research techniques. These are complex, highly specialized and expensive techniques that are not worth repeating periodically.
However, the digital world and innovations in artificial intelligence will allow us to have a much simpler and cheaper set of tools to analyze our audiences.
Until a few years ago, the data used to build buyer personas were fictitious and their quality depended a lot on the researcher’s experience.
Nowadays, it is possible to work with real data, following the customers’ traces through the Internet. In this way, the precision with which behavioral patterns are detected is much higher.
It is also easier to capture insights from the people who follow influencers, thus determining their preferences for certain proposals.
All this comes hand in hand with a set of tools, many of them based on artificial intelligence, which we can use to define or improve our audiences.
In this way, we cover one more step on the road to the success of our content marketing strategy.
