41.3% of content marketers don't do enough audience research, and the number one reason for that is time, according to State of (Dis)Content.
Time is a precious resource for solopreneurs and small-team content marketers. You have to manage it to ideate, write, optimise, and repurpose content. Yet, you still have to deal with trivial issues like whether to use em dash or not.
So, where will you find the time for audience research?
Wait, is audience research even important?
Frankly, if you want leadership buy-in and career satisfaction, audience research is non-negotiable. As revealed in the State of (Dis)Content: Audience research is key to everything — from leadership buy-in and compensation to career satisfaction.
Without audience research, leadership buy-in drops. When this happens, compensation for content marketing is low. Hence, low creativity and, ultimately, career dissatisfaction.
Feeling down? Don't be. Here is what you should do: Prioritise!
Be a ruthless prioritiser
Case in point: Attentive content team
On the Content Briefly podcast, Kasey Hickey at Attentive, said her content team is small:
2 full-time content marketers
1 senior content marketing manager
1 copywriter
Yet, they are pulling off incredible results like this:
The secret, according to Kasey, is being a ruthless prioritise: "We constantly reshuffle our strategy based on what customers want and need to know."
The result? Leadership and whole-team buy-in. This is evident in the heavy involvement of in-house SMEs in Attentive blogs.
The takeaway: adopt a similar strategy in your workflow. Do it in part like this:
First, prioritise audience research.
Then, find a way to simplify or automate content creation and collaboration.
Fortunately, I know a content/project management tool, Newtn., that can help with the second step — and free up even more time for audience research. I jumped on a demo call with the Founder, Pierre Seillier. Below is what I learned.
What is Newtn.?
If you're active on LinkedIn, you will have heard of Relato. The founder, David Baum, is building the tool in public to be what CRM is to sales for content marketers.
Newtn. offers the same thing — a personal space containing everything content folk need. It is a combination of:
ChatGPT,
Airtable,
Notion, and
Make (think Zapier but for more advanced automation)
In short, Newtn. is an all-in-one platform for content marketers, brand managers, and sales teams to analyse old content, create new ones, and collaborate while at it.
But unlike Relato, as when writing this piece, Newtn. is already live. And there is a 2-week, free trial option to test it.
According to Pierre, Newtn. might get a name change in early 2025 for SEO reasons. If (and when) that happens, I'll update this post.
Newtn. standout features and how to use them to automate your content creation
I used Newtn. free trial to test its features after the demo call with Pierre. These 3 stood out for me:
Content Hub
Brainstorm
Team
Content Hub
By now, you should have a baseline of what your ICPs want — given that you prioritised audience research. Even at that, don't go straight into content production. Instead, audit your existing content assets.
Ask yourself these questions:
What content meets your audience's needs?
What content is a priority, and which one needs to give way?
What content is outdated and needs a fresh POV or facts?
Newtn's Content Hub will answer the questions. The Content Hub (located in the "content published" tab) is like the WP admin dashboard but with content analysis.
The Content Hub is further divided into 3 sections:
All content: check published content, campaigns, persona targeted, and author at a glance.
To update: has scores for content staleness, impact, and priority. With that, Newtn. informs you on the asset to update and why (the recommendation column).
Overview: contains a mix of charts for content production, format, and distribution.
Of the 3 sections, my favourite is the content distribution chart. It shows how content aligns with prospects across the buying stage. Interestingly, this can help with leadership buy-in.
Here's how:
In my chart, X (he who shall not be named) only produces awareness content. If the audience research shows the need for ToFu content, then no issue. Otherwise, the whole campaign would be a total waste of time and money with zero leads. Good luck with content attribution and getting leadership buy-in.
Note: to fully explore the Content Hub, you must integrate your CMS (WP or Webflow) and GA with Newtn.
Brainstorm
With your content plan decided, it's time to write the assets. But in what direction? What personas are you targeting? Will you consider the demographics?
Newtn.'s ChatGPT, Brainstorm, can help. It's your research/writing assistant — without ChatGPT's "unlocking" and "deep diving."
Brainstorm is the core content production feature on Newtn. Like the Content Hub, it is also divided into 3 sections.
LinkedIn posts
Blog posts and topics (for content repurposing)
Team ideas
Sections 1 and 2 come with preloaded ideas, which you can fine-tune within 5 clicks to ready-to-publish content. The ideas depend on your account details (like personas, WP site, and brand voice).
I like that Newtn. extracts keywords from your existing content for the ideas. Besides, you can set (change or add to) your personas and brand voice in the "personas" tab.
Here's how:
Click Personas on the left tab
Then, go to Guidelines
Also, you can add terms to use and avoid — to prevent sounding like AI. The best part: the preloaded ideas are updated daily.
Say you prefer your ideas (but want AI assistance), use the "write about a specific topic" button.
“Team ideas" offer similar perks. Use it to get topics, POVs, or strategies and topic ideas from internal SMEs and your content team members.
Team
The end goal of audience research is leadership buy-in. Now that you have it, you must maximise it.
Feature the leaders — of product, sales & marketing, and customer relations — in your content.
This is where Newtn's collaboration feature, Team, shines.
Newtn's Team can be your Slack (for internal communication with your content team) or Leaps (for gathering SME quotes from in-house experts). The application is endless.
For me, though, the Leaps-esque use case is the cream of the crop. Here's how it works:
First, add users and set their roles
Second, create a draft with Content Hub.
For existing drafts, go to projects > select a title.
Lastly, assign tasks and set deadlines.
You can only use Newtn.'s collaboration feature on a paid (team) plan.
Audience research is crucial to leadership buy-in and career satisfaction. Yet, content marketers don't do it enough. But you don't have to be like everyone else.
In conclusion:
Be different.
Prioritise audience research.
And always free up time for it by automating other aspects of your content creation process.
If you enjoyed Seun's work, read this piece he wrote for Write Wiser about fractional HOCs.
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