Many content marketers are just “waiting to content” rather than listening to their audience to see what works, what doesn’t, and what they need.

At Toast, we proud ourselves on focusing on building audiences rather than just producing content.

In the end, the content we produce will exist to bring value to a specific audience. To inform, educate or entertain them.

But a lot of content producers focus too much on the content production part, and not enough on the “why” of that content.

In Robert Rose’s words at Content Marketing Institute, they are just “waiting to content.”

This is the reason we’ve been building research capabilities to Toast’s Content Strategy service pillar. Being able to gather, analyze and build insights off audience data is key for the work we do.

In a Content Marketing Institute article, Rose refers to a research that shows what the biggest challenges are for marketers when thinking about their audiences.

Coming in the #1 and #2 spots are:

• “Prioritizing marketing efforts toward one audience over another.”

• “Knowing what is most important to the audience(s).”

When thinking about audiences, their needs and their expectations, you see how one must make choices. And that is the hard part.

We know that trying to please everyone does not work. We end up pleasing no one when we do that.

So why is this still being done with content?

A broadcaster recently asked us to pitch a show that targets a specific demographic audience. But even for this project, in that target audience, who will we choose? Listening and research will help us do just that. We’ve gathered reports and launched a research project that will allow to make decisions based on data.

Also, in the past year, we’ve conducted research initiatives that have allowed us to gather precious data points on the expectations and needs of various audience segments, and these insights inform the content strategies we build and the productions we do.

So how are you listening to your audience to produce better content aligned with an even better strategy?

If you would like to discuss audience research let us know and schedule a consultation with our experts at Toast today.