If there’s one thing that the web isn’t lacking at the moment, it’s content. The challenge for businesses isn’t producing more content, it’s about developing the right content for your specific audience, at the right time in their journey, to make it easier for them to take the action you want.
In this guide, we explore how you can develop the right content marketing mix for your audience, whether B2B or B2C, by understanding:
- Who they are
- What drives them
- What holds them back
- What content resonates most with them
- What they actually need in order to make conversion decisions.
Getting the content marketing mix right for your unique audience helps to ensure that you make the most of your budget and maximise ROI.
Jump to :
- Segment your audience beyond surface demographics
- Identify pain points and barriers to conversion
- Match content formats to audience preferences
- Map content to every stage of the buying journey
- Gather data and insight to refine your mix over time
- Build a process for continuous optimisation
- Don’t forget to tell stories
Segment your audience beyond surface demographics
Most brands think they know their audience, but sometimes this knowledge sits at surface level: age, job title, or purchase history. To shape an effective content mix, you need segmentation that connects behavioural data, psychology, and context.
B2C audiences
Consider the motivations and moments that drive purchases from your various customers. Just because someone fits into a certain age category doesn’t necessarily mean they make decisions in the same ways. For example, if your segment is ‘millennial parents’, this could include:
- Budget-conscious shoppers prioritising value and reliability
- Time-poor parents looking for convenience
- Ethically motivated buyers seeking sustainability
Each of these audience segments requires different messaging and different content types to connect and trigger an action.
B2B audiences
This will depend on the type and size of businesses you want to reach, but in many cases, audience segmentation needs to account for a decision committee, not just an individual. For complex B2B purchases, there are often several stakeholders in different roles and they all have their own pain points, coming at it from very different angles. To be more successful, your content marketing mix needs to incorporate mapping these various roles and their needs into the strategy, as they all feed into buying decisions.
Finding the audience segment data
While we’re still waiting for the silver bullet of audience research tools to be created that does it all, there are a number of ways to gather this kind of useful data from different sources.
You can use:
- For B2B, use LinkedIn Audience Insights to find out user interests and engagement behaviour, on top of the usual demographics. On top of this, taking a bit of a dive into the LinkedIn and other public social media profiles of individual potential customers, including their posts, updates and the things they engage with, gives you real-world examples of the types of content that prompt them to action.
- For your existing customers, look at GA4 audience reports. These are based on metrics that are relevant to you, such as number of purchases or types of events triggered, and how they engage with your site content.
- Need actionable B2C insights? Try SparkToro. You can identify patterns in where your audience goes for their information (like press, socials, podcasts etc.), the brands they already connect with (giving inspiration on content type, tone, and more), as well as the different formats they engage with.
Combining this kind of information with your own first-party CRM and email engagement data helps you create more rounded personas that genuinely reflect your audiences and their digital content preferences.
Identify pain points and barriers to conversion
A well planned and implemented content marketing mix doesn’t just promote you, it actively removes friction from the user journey. Understanding why your audience chooses to engage (or not) is key to developing content that overcomes audience hesitancy and delivers meaningful connection (and conversions).
How to uncover pain points
Talking to your target audience is the best way to find out what their pain points are. You can:
- Conduct customer interviews (short, focused, and open-ended)
- Analyse customer service transcripts or chat logs
- Monitor communities, review platforms, and social mentions
This can give you valuable insights into what frustrates and motivates your audience. It can also be used to inform content that builds trust and reassurance, showing that you understand the potential issues and concerns and can prove that you’re finding ways to overcome them.
Map barriers to the customer journey
Every stage of the customer journey will have potential barriers, like:
- Awareness: “Why does this matter to me?”
- Consideration: “I’m not sure this will work for my situation.”
- Decision: “How do I know this is the best deal or choice?”
The right content can help to break down each of these obstacles, but you need to know they exist first.
Using heatmapping and user journey tools such as Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity (which is free!), you can discover where your users often hesitate or drop off on your own website. If you can pair this data with customer surveys to help get under the skin of the ‘why’ then this gives you a much fuller picture of what’s happening, and how to best solve it.
Match content formats to audience preferences
Your content marketing mix needs to take into account not just what you want to say, but how your audience prefers to find, digest and engage with content. This will be based on your own data and audience insights, but as an example:
Content formats that often work well with B2C audiences
- Short-form video (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts): Perfect for awareness and emotional resonance.
- User-generated content (UGC): Builds trust through authenticity.
- How-to blogs and guides: Drive organic search visibility while helping users overcome small barriers to purchase.
- Email content and loyalty campaigns: Nurture repeat engagement and advocacy.
Content formats that often work well for B2B audiences
- Long-form thought leadership (whitepapers, webinars, podcasts): Ideal for building authority and guiding early-stage research.
- Case studies, reports, whitepapers and ROI calculators: Support middle and late-stage decision-making.
- Interactive tools or demos: Offer a useful and time-saving solution to a known problem. Shorten the distance between consideration and conversion.
- LinkedIn articles and SlideShares: Amplify professional credibility and drive conversation.
Testing content formats for your specific audience is key
Your audience will be likely to have a real mix of content preferences, so it’s always useful to audit performance for past content types and try different things when testing new content.
Make sure your review of past content includes engagement metrics and conversion metrics as well as clicks/views/reach. To have an effective strategy, it’s important to identify which content formats genuinely help to drive movement through the funnel, not just impressions or likes.
Map content to every stage of the buying journey
Getting the mix right isn’t about having all the content types, it’s about having the right ones at each stage of the journey.
You can develop a brand-specific content marketing matrix to plot audience segments against journey stages and content types. This makes gaps and overlaps more easily visible in the planning stages, ensuring your resources go toward filling strategic holes, not duplicating effort.
This can also help to focus your creative ideation for what the specific content will actually be, further down the line. Our content marketing planning tips can also help with this.
Here’s an example (below), but you could take this further, by shaping a matrix that’s audience-first and overlays your content pillars too.
Gather data and insight to refine your mix over time
A great content marketing mix isn’t static. The platforms, preferences, and behaviours of your audience evolve, so your strategy must do that too. That means developing an insight loop that keeps your content decisions data-informed and fresh. Some of the ways to do this include:
Quantitative tools
- GA4 & Looker Studio: To track assisted conversions and engagement by content type
- CRM analytics (e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce): To tie content touches to pipeline impact
- Social listening tools (e.g. Brandwatch, Sprout Social): To identify patterns, emerging themes or sentiment shifts.
Qualitative methods
- Customer interviews and feedback loops: Regularly refresh your understanding of customer motivations and what they actually want from you to make conversion decisions
- Sales and customer success team input: These are the people who hear objections and pain points daily, making their insights a goldmine for marketers
- Content performance reviews: Quarterly audits of top-performing and underperforming content assets.
Check out our guide to content marketing metrics for more actionable tips to track and evaluate performance.
The most important part of this process is in actually taking action off the back of the data you gather. Once you know what is working best by audience segment, funnel stage and format, you can tweak your ongoing strategy to better give the people what they have shown you they want.
Build a process for continuous optimisation
Getting the right content marketing mix is never a one-off project; it’s a continual process of testing, learning, and refining.
You can use this simple framework as a starting point to implement continual optimisation with your content:
- Benchmark – Identify your top 10 performing pieces of content by engagement and conversion
- Segment – Map which audience and funnel stage each belongs to
- Diagnose – Identify under-served audiences or stages
- Experiment – Test new content formats or channels targeted at those gaps
- Measure – Define KPIs upfront (e.g. sales, downloads, demo requests, CTRs, or dwell time)
- Refine – Double down on what works, phase out what doesn’t.
By turning this process into a quarterly discipline, your content strategy becomes more resilient and responsive, being grounded in data, not assumptions or guesswork.
Don’t forget to tell stories
Even the most data-driven content strategies need to leave plenty of room for creativity and storytelling. Whether B2B or B2C, your audience is still human, and humans respond to emotion, not just facts or logic.
- In B2B, emotion often displays as trust, confidence, or professional pride
- In B2C, it’s usually more about joy, a sense of belonging, or aspiration.
Injecting that human narrative (and tone of voice) into your content creates the emotional momentum that is needed in order for your content to be memorable and your strategy to be the most effective possible.
Getting the content marketing mix right for your audience isn’t about producing or repurposing more content for every platform and channel so that every possible base is covered, it’s about being more purposeful with the resources you have. When you better understand your audience’s motivations, challenges, and journeys, you can create content that meets them where they are and moves them closer to where you want them to be.
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