Content management is an essential way of attracting an audience and keeping their attention. Even if other companies and organisations aren’t directly competing with your product, they are always competing for your audience’s attention.

There are only so many hours in a day. Therefore you want to make sure they are being used wisely, to create content that will encourage your audience to spend time learning more about your products, services and brand.

It can seem like a daunting task but here are a few ways you can ensure your content has the power to keep your target audience engaged.

Tools for learning about your audience

The first step to creating engaging content is to know who it is you’re trying to reach. You’ll need to do research to get to know what your audience finds entertaining and what their other interests are. Here are two of the best sites to conduct research on your audience:

• MakeMyPersona.com: MakeMyPersona.com guides you step-by-step through creating a buyer persona. It’s perfect for those just starting out as it takes you through in-depth questions to help you create the profile of your target customer.
• Akoonu: Akoonu is there when you’re ready to develop a more complete profile of your target audience. It helps you plan by assisting in identifying what content each member of your audience prefers and how they interact with the buying process.

Essential content creation tools

Once you’ve determined who your audience is and what style of content caters to their needs, you can begin planning your content. There are plenty of tools to aid you with this task. Here are the basic tools that every content manager uses:

• Google Keyword Tool: This tool helps you find the best sequence of words to use in your titles and articles that are most often searched for on Google.
• Resize.it:  Resize.it is great to use when you want to place images in your articles. It assists you in creating the right dimensions for e-books and PDFs.
• Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator: If you are having trouble deciding on a topic to write about, this generator can be of great help. You provide it with the keywords you want to focus on and it will supply a list of suggested topics.

These are just the basic tools for any content toolkit — there are many resources out there. At ALHAUS, we understand how to create effective content for any audience. If you're just getting started, check out these tools and talk to our content management experts so that you can create the best content for your brand identity.