Identifying your target audience for your website is one of the founding items to consider when designing your website.
It entails understanding who your ideal prospects and customers are, who your competitors are and how does your product or service solve your customers problem or pain point.
Who, what, why and where?
Targeted marketing allows you to focus your message on the right market.
What Is Your Target Audience?
A target audience is a particular group of people that want or need your particular service – your potential customers
They can be described by attributes broadly categorised in three groups:
- Demography
- Interests
- Purchase intentions
These attributes can include:
- Male or female
- Are they single or married?
- Do they have children?
- Education level
- What language do they speak?
- Where are they from
- Where do they hang out on and offline – where can you find them!
- How do they like to communicate – email, text, phone call etc
- Age range
- What stage of lie are they at – college, retirement
- Expertise
- Location
- Where do they work, size of company, what industry
- Job title
- How much do they earn?
- What spending power do they have ?
- Hobbies
- What TV do they watch?
- What other businesses do they interact with?
- Behaviours
- Attitudes
- Life style preferences
- Personality type
- What pain points does your service solve for them
- What type of house do they live in
- Who are their friends?
- What are their needs or aspirations?
- What are their problems and concerns?
- What are their favourite website?
- What is their buying motivation?
- What are their buying concerns?
How To Identify Your Target Audience
Start with your current customers
- What does your current client base look like
- What are the characteristics of your best existing customers – consider the largest order size, the longest retention, the easiest customers to work with
- Who are the most recent
- How often do they buy
- Are there any customers you do not want to work with or cost you money!
- Send out surveys to customers to find out what they want – do you offer that?
Also consider:
- Who has a need or interest in your product or service?
- What benefits does your service offer and who needs those?
When you understand the benefits you provide, you can understand who will benefit from those. Who could buy your service?
Keep an eye on customer feedback – you will notice trends in user demographics – note the details of people who you most resonate with.
Narrow down and define who you trying to appeal to – own your own niche – not everybody is your customer.
Join forums and Facebook groups to find out what problems they have – see the world through their eyes – if you can, help for free. Once you know their problems you can build a website to answer their queries and solve their problems.
Consider Your Competition
If your competitors are selling a similar service to yours and have been doing so for a number of years, they already know your audience well.
Look at what they are doing on their website, what are they blogging about, what are they posting on social media – can you do it better.
- What have your competitors already learned?
- Who are your competitor’s customers and how do they market to them.
- Who are your competitor’s subscribers on social media?
Explanation Of Target Audience On Wikipedia
Resist The Urge To Overcomplicate Determining Your Target Audience
There are very many factors you can consider to determine your target audience.
Get an idea of the main factors for your particular business, and always keep this ‘buying persona’ in mind when considering your website design.
On a basic level, who is most likely to push your contact us button on your website? If it is someone like your friend Trevor, think about Trevor and figure out what type of audience Trevor belongs to.
Over time you will naturally get a better idea of who your ideal target audience is.
No matter how much research you do, you cannot truly know who your audience is until you see who is visiting your site, and this is where Google Analytics can help.
When first starting a website, you won’t have that much data about your audience. As you get more traffic, you can get better information about who’s visiting.
Once you have this information you can adjust your website and digital marketing campaigns accordingly.
How can We Help You With Determining Your Target Audience?
JSP Web Design can help you determining your particular ‘buying persona’ – the target audience for your website – and design your website to suit, to ensure you are targeting the right customers for you, to ensure you get the best return on your marketing investment.
