Identify The Target Audience For Your Business

What is it you wish to have for your website business? Traffic? Sales? Content? New website owners may think the first two.

All three are important. You cannot have one without the other two and to become successful as an online business owner it is Content that needs to be your main focus.

However, before you even create your content you need to identify your target audience. They are the most important part of your marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

1. What Does The Term Target Audience Mean
2. Importance of Identifying Your Target Audience
3. How To Identify Your Target Audience
4. Conclusions

What Does The Term Target Audience Mean

The target audience for your business is the persons you intend to sell to. They are the ones you will want to direct your marketing strategy at.

As a result, you will need to know who they are and what they need so that you can understand what will appeal to them.

Importance Of Identifying Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience helps you to sell better. In content marketing more than any other field knowing the people, your content is meant to appeal to will help you to write better and generate more traffic.

Think, if you are writing content for young children you will need to be cognizant of your words. They will need to be relatable and captivating. Your writing will need to be shorter to appeal to their attention span.

You will need to use graphics.

That need to connect with your audience is why you will need to ask yourself who is my target audience? Where do they spend their time online? Where do they work? What is their educational background? What are their hobbies? What are their needs? How will my site satisfy their needs?

Once you are able to answer all these questions, all of your content is to be written to appeal to your target audience.

Related Article: 9 Practical Steps In Planning And Developing A Website

How To Identify Your Target Audience

1. Look at Your Current Customer Base
2. Identify Who Are The persons Most Likely To Benefit From Your Product Or Service
3. Create User Personas Of Your Intended Audience
4. Check Google Analytics
5. Check Your Social Media Analytics
6. Check Out Your Competition

Look at Your Current Customer Base

If you already have customers they should be the first people you look at. First, identify your return customers.

1. Who brings in the most income for the least amount of work.
2. Which ones buy smaller, less expensive items but regularly?

You will want to keep these and appeal to their needs. Additionally understanding what appeals to them will help you to find others just like them and expand your market.

So the next thing you will need to do is find the common characteristics among them. This will help you to better meet their needs. You will want to know why they keep coming back to your business.

Now there is another group of customers you will want to look out for. These are customers who cost a great deal of time and effort and and quite often a loss of revenue.

You will need to analyze the data here too. Weigh the income, time and effort that goes into meeting the needs of these customers then decide if they are worthy of your time and effort.

Conduct A Customer Survey

Do it as simple as possible. One good way to do this is by using multiple choice questions and radio buttons. Be sure to keep the list short about 20 to 24 questions.

Your customers are more likely to answer these types of questions because they easier to answer and with such a short list they will not take much time.

Your target audience are busy people so anything more detailed is likely to chase them away and leave your questions unanswered.

Choose your questions carefully to get the most out of the information collected.

Answer The Question – Who Is Most Likely To Benefit From Your Product Or Service?

What are the features of your product? What other persons besides those already in your target market are likely to benefit from this?

How do you reach them?

Understand this may give you a new direction in expanding your business.

Create User Personas Of Your Intended Audience

If you are building a site for battered women because of your own experiences you may already have some inside into your target audience.

Chances are you will want to appeal to women who have limited resources and come from a certain background where support is not easily accessible.

What is their age range, employment background, ethnicity, and country(s) of origin?

Coming up with answers to these questions will help you to have a better picture of your ideal customer and therefore cater to their needs.

Best Free Tools for Finding Your Target Audience

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best free tools available to help you to find information about your target audience.

It tells you who your visitors are, how they are finding you, what they are searching for, how long they spent on your site, which pages they visited and so much more.

To learn better understand the information shown in Google Analytics and easily find the relevant information be sure to look at the video below.

Bing Web Master Tool

Like Google Analytics, the Bing Webmaster tool offers a great deal of free information about your user interaction with your website.

While this is a smaller search engine do not overlook its value to your business. It is much easier to rank on this search engine than Google. As a result, much of your organic traffic may come from this source.

The video below will help you to understand the information Bing generates and help you to better understand your customers.

Lastly

Do not give up. Building an online business/blog takes time and consistent publishing. Real progress will not begin to show for at least six months.

There is nothing unusual about this. Most businesses start out slowly at first so be patient. Have your plan and work. Create a plan then work your plan. The payoff comes later.

Conclusion

Identifying your target audience is crucial to writing good content and building a profitable online business.

It takes time to find them and understand who they are. However, if you do not take time to do so you may find yourself marketing to the wrong people and in essence waste valuable time.

Learn more about identifying your target audience.

Before You Go

Do you have questions or comments about finding the target audience for your business?

Be sure to leave a comment in the section below and I will be sure to get back to you within 24 hours.

Candy Benn