7 Questions for Creating Audience-Centric Content

Many business and marketing questions can be resolved with strategic audience insight.

But even established businesses struggle to get insight from their audiences because they don’t have a process or methodology for collecting large-scale qualitative data.

You have a closer relationship with your audience as a coach or entrepreneur. Still, you may struggle to clearly understand what your audience wants, needs, or thinks.

You can’t prepare an offer, presentation, or sales copy without good audience insight, and you’ll be guessing instead of knowing. Or you’ll talk too much about everything from your perspective, making your messages irrelevant to the crowd.

Instead, you need to do more work to get into the minds of your audience before carving out your point of view. You need to get deep into their fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations to know what messages will resonate or not.

This is a challenging exercise, but it doesn’t need to be. There are strategic questions you can ask and communities you can visit to get more insight into what is driving your audience’s decisions.

For years, we’ve worked with leaders on crafting stage content for both cold and warm audiences. In the case of cold audiences, we’d do our research to identify answers to the questions below. For warm audiences, we would use survey and polling results as the basis for crafting content that would resonate more.

Whenever you can help an audience learn more about themselves, you amplify trust and impact, which play well for your brand. 

(Questions below adapted and expanded from Nancy Duarte’s Slideology [AFFILIATE LINK])

1: What are they like?

Use demographic and psychographic research to get insight into their perspective. Find someone in that audience demographic and get to know them. Understand what the world is like from their perspective and how your narrative fits into it. 

2. Why are they here?

What are they looking to get out of your presentation? What is the transformation they want in their life that will take them from where they are today to where they want to be?

3. What keeps them up at night about your subject?

These are core human needs: safety, security, certainty, or rather, the lack of those things. What is it that bothers or disturbs them? Can you bring it to the forefront in a comforting way? 

4. How can you solve their problems?

Do you have an illustrative example of sharing? Can you think of any exercises that might help reframe their thinking? Can you demonstrate alternative paths they haven’t considered?

5. What do YOU want them to do?

What do you want them to change about how they currently do things? What action should they take after they read or listen to your content? Have you simplified this path to make it as easy as possible?

6. How might they resist?

What would keep them from adopting your transformation for themselves? Are these inner or outer forms of resistance? Can you counter them? How does your solution/idea/program help them?

7. How can you best reach them?

Are they visual learners? (HINT: 2/3 of all people are). How do you appeal to their head and heart in respective measures? 

Going further

If you had a direct “in” with someone in your audience, you could interview them, catch their language and find out what’s most valuable just by asking. The truth is that great conversion copywriters do this all the time, especially when helping to craft sales copy and offers. That’s why it’s great to take all the questions above and find where your audience already hangs out and read/listen to how they speak. 

With these questions in mind, try to come up with answers before working on your content. Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit– all of these communities collect and engage like-minded folks in themed communities. Try filtering for popularity and see what problems have a lot of engagement. 

Getting support

At Outspoke Design, we help our clients design, brand, and launch profitable programs over the course of two months, two weeks, or even two days. 

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