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One of the biggest advantages of content marketing is that it allows you to focus on your target audience. The key is to align your business objectives and content production with your target audience’s tasks. This includes everything from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle. Taking this approach to content marketing will aid you in building trust and helping your target audience to achieve those tasks. As well as an opportunity to present valuable content, showcase your products and/or hire your business for services.

Combining content strategy with content marketing is a great way to place a spotlight on your target audience. This focus on your customer’s needs will naturally inform, motivate and humanize business transactions. To fully build trust with your target audience you will need to fully research what is that they need, and how you can go about meeting those needs. If the buying process includes online reviews, make it a point to encourage your customers to give feedback and welcome all opinions (good or bad).

The key is to reach people where they live (email, social media, surveys, etc.) and create an open line of communication between customer and business. This will greatly improve trust and build a rapport that can be maintained and built upon. Below, I am going to discuss a number of pressure points that can help you reach your target audience and cultivate relationships for years to come. Always remember that content marketing is about reaching the right people, creating conversations and engaging them through your brand presence.

Now, let’s get started on ‘How To Gain Trust With Your Target Audience’.

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1. Focus On The Right People

The Internet is a vast and wide place when it comes to communication. This is why content marketing has become so valuable over the last decade. Deploying content marketing as a strategy to reach your target audience will allow them to ‘stumble upon’ your content when seeking information, reading online reviews and interacting with other customers.

The biggest question that needs answering is: What are your target audience’s needs? This will allow you to shape your content around a number of topics that can help position your business as a trusted source and a ‘problem solver’. It’s about finding a common ground between what people ‘like’ and what people ‘need’. A great example is the comparison between two middle-aged consumers (homeowners), let’s say a wife and a husband who enjoy gardening.

The husband could be an avid landscaper and the wife could love the work that her husband does around the yard. When presenting content, the difference is in the approach. For example, HGTV could reach both consumers by executing a content strategy that speaks to both the husband and wife.

• Copy the Look: 5 Gorgeous Year-Round Garden Ideas
• 25 Garden Tools and Essentials for Year-Round Care

Now think about it, which piece of content is the husband or wife most likely to consume? That is that value of content marketing, a business can strategically reach their target audience while addressing the wants and needs of both consumers. This is a process that can be repeated a thousand times over.

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2. Learn The Basics Of Content Strategy

This is the part of the process that is most important to building trust with your target audience. Content strategy will place a focus on meeting the needs of your target audience and help your business achieve its main objectives (increasing revenue, reaching more customers, building an online community, etc). Content strategy is about how you present the information that your target audiences needs.

This includes the choice of content format that is naturally recognizable by your target audience. Content strategy lays out a step-by-step plan on you will want to publish content and improve upon you content production process to better serve your target audience. Through experimentation, you’ll be able to build a system around target audience that serves their needs and helps your business achieve its goals.

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3. Build An Online Community

Building an online community is a crucial piece of gaining trust with your target audience. It allows current and potential customers to follow your business on a journey that – not only – provides accessible content. It promotes a sense of community where people can share and grow around their favorite tasks, hobbies and pastimes. This will naturally develop a connection that serves everyone’s needs.

Going back to HGTV, the users that consume content on HGTV’s platform are most likely to search for products, read reviews and make it a habit to stay updated on the topic of the hour. So when people are in search of a product or service that you offer they can naturally refer back to your business for information or a product/service. This is why content marketing has replaced advertising as the top driver of consumer behavior. It used to be, ‘Advertising to drive content’, now it’s ‘Content to drive advertising‘.

Building trust begins with awareness. Never forget that the Internet is backed by real people. It’s about how you connect with those people that will ultimately decide how well your business engages with its target audience. People will always seek out valuable information. Gaining trust with your target audience is about how you present your brand, products and services through readily available content.

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To recap on ‘How To Gain Trust With Your Target Audience’:

1. Focus on the right people.
2. Develop a content strategy.
3. Build an online community.

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