What are some of the best practices for creating engaging and relevant content for your target audience?

In my experience, the beauty of digital is that it offers you a quick directional feedback. For example, A/B testing is one of the best techniques to test a single lever between cell A and B. I remember testing an ad with a single variable - colour vs black & white ads. The response to the second ad was higher for the product (a premium one) as people perceived black and white to be more premium. This was an easy way to test if black and white branding does work for premium products.

It’s all in the head. The head of your audience that is. Get into their head. Understand how they feel and why they might feel that way. Better yet, if you’re fortunate enough to possess the superpower of empathy, then feel what they feel. Share their joy. Know their pain. When you understand the things that make them smile and the anxieties that motivate their behavior, you can better create content that addresses their emotional needs.

Being clear on what you want to achieve from your content is crucial, goals and metrics are a vital part of this, without this you won't achieve great results. How you would creatively execute a brand awareness campaign versus a trade driving campaign would be very different. A brand awareness campaign would be looking to achieve impression, interactions and reposts, whilst a trade driving campaign would be looking to capture details, clicks to landing details etc. Its a constant conversation marketers have with other departments, brand awareness campaigns won't always drive sales in the immediate, or even, short term. You set goals and metrics to help grow you brand, which should eventually help you drive sales.

Reach where your audience is present. Once you've identified your audience group, the next thing is to identify the channels they're active in. With N number of social media channels present nowadays, narrow down 2-3 channels that your audience uses every day and tailor content for each platform. You can use scheduling apps and AI to help you create content or gather ideas. Sticking to a particular format/graphics also helps.

Understanding your target customer is one of the most important parts of creating engaging and relevant content. At Spark Emotions, we work with people in many roles, ranging from brand, insight, category or marketing roles, each of these roles are looking for similar outputs from a research project but with clear and nuanced differences. We spend a lot time thinking about what they would need from a piece of research and then we create content that aligns. By keeping your target customer in mind, you are able to creative much more engaging and relevant content.

We spend a lot of time understanding emotion, we know that is one of the most effective ways of capturing someone's attention and gaining engagement. Whether it's people being drawn to faces, certain colours evoking different emotions or using emotive or directional language, tapping into emotions with help you drive improvement in your content campaigns.