As every parent knows, when your baby first becomes mobile, you need to prepare yourself not only for bumps, bruises and lots more worry, but also for the dreaded task of accident-proofing your home.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the experts advise you to get on your hands and knees, and see things from the child’s perspective. Understandably, you might be wondering what this has to do with content marketing.

As marketers, we spend plenty of time and money researching our customers and prospects, understanding their challenges and learning about what makes them tick. This covers all sorts — from the type of information they consume to how and when they consume it.

But what about the why?

Do we spend enough time considering why they consume information? Take a Twitter feed, for example. You may know that your audience are most engaged on Wednesdays and Thursdays, between the hours of 11am and 2pm, but do you know what they are looking for when they visit your feed? If they’re just looking for a ten-minute diversion, you can modify your output to give them just that and still work back to your brand and your message.

Maybe it’s time we all (metaphorically) got down on our hands and knees not just to see what our customers see but also to understand exactly what grabs their attention — the ‘why’. Gaining insight into what your customers want from your content can be done in a number of ways (we have a whole ebook on the subject), and in truth people will probably be picking up your content for a number of reasons. But the bottom line is this: if you better understand those reasons, you can create content that’s fine-tuned to answer their questions and meet their needs.