Who Are Your Target Audience - Learn This To Avoid Inviting The Wrong People To Your Website

byDeniseAS

625 followers

Updated 5 years ago

So you write this amazing blog and it is full of research and incredible information, anyone who clicks on your blog will definitely stick around and not leave you blogging to an empty room. Right, or maybe not totally right?

Why Have They Left Me?

Knowing your topic and giving your reader a valuable, enjoyable, informative article is what we all should be aiming at. The hiccup comes if your incredible blog is being aimed at the wrong target audience, or even worse no particular audience at all.

Target Audience What Does This Mean?

While you may know your subject inside out, are you aiming it at the right audience?

Let me put myself under the microscope to give you an understanding of what I am talking about.

I am a 55-year-old Mom, with a 6-year-old son. I am married, and we live in a rural town. I am active, love to exercise and am very involved in my son's activities. So my niche could be to do with children, focusing on being a Mom. When I come to write my blogs, I need to consider who I think will be attracted to what I have to say. While I have a 6-year-old, it is unlikely that I am going to have a large following from say the 20 something Moms who also have children in a similar age group, but have a totally different life experience to me.

Yes we do have a child of the same age in common, but I have a different way of talking, I relate to a different error of music, movies. I remember life before mobiles, apps, faxes, being famous on YouTube just for posting about your family and so much more.

In my son's class there are actually 5 sets of parents who are mature, and even though I try to stay up to date with trends and consider myself to have a young attitude, we have naturally grouped together, the reason for this is we can relate on so many levels to each other.

Digging deeper my target audience could then be mature parents with younger children. This group of people are far more likely to respond to my writing than a twenty-something mom is. Now while I listen to Hip Hop, I can also sing all the words to Meatloaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light". My mature audience are far more likely to be able to sing along with me than a younger audience. I would love a sports car, but am old enough to know better, so I drive a people mover, to fit in all my son's sporting gear and his friends and their gear. Mature parenting is a group of people I can and do fully relate to, so am able to target and understand their anxieties and offer solutions to them.

This is all good, but how do you find your target audience?

Create A Customer Avatar

Knowing who your target audience is could be as easy as creating a customer avatar for yourself. Look at your niche and then think about who is likely to read what you have written. If you are a retired woman writing about computer technology, even though you may be an expert, you more than likely will struggle to attract young twenty year old males to your site. Your target could be retired people, or even more mature people who are scared of computer technology and need to relate to someone who can explain it to them, slowly and in minute detail and preferably in large fonts.

Your first step is to draw up a Customer Avatar. Give your Avatar a name, lets use Jenny, an address, an income and note where Jenny lives. How old is Jenny and what does she look like? What is the makeup of Jenny's household? How much income does Jenny earn, is Jenny a stay at home Mom? What is Jenny's education level? Then dig deeper, where does Jenny like to shop, what does she buy, does she shop online, does Jenny have extra disposable income? Does Jenny like to travel, exercise, what music does she listen to? What books does Jenny like to read on her Kindle, or does Jenny only go to the library and read "real books". What news items interest Jenny, what TV programs does she watch, does she like to cook, does she have children and what age are they?

The one important thing to find out about Jenny is her anxieties, what her biggest fears are, so that you can understand them, and show how you can help her solve them.

You can dig as deep as you like and build up as much information on Jenny as possible. Once you have done your research and created Jenny, how can you use this information to target your audience?

Understanding & Using Your Customer Avatar

Having a customer Avatar will give you a greater understanding of your target audience's hobbies, backgrounds, demographics and interests. This will then help you to determine the best way to write your blog that will resonate with Jenny and help her to realize that you understand her fears, that you relate to her, and you have a solution that is appropriate for her.

Of course not every person is the same, however, researching and building a customer Avatar can focus you in on your target audience and help you to understand how to reach them, and therefore, write in a manner that relates directly to them.

You may draw up a few different Avatars, depending on how many websites or different niche areas you want to blog about.

Fill Up Those Seats

Using a customer Avatar will help you to focus on your niche, your target audience and how to write to appeal to them. This will lead to a higher number of visitors reading your blogs and connecting with you. Trying to sell me a sports car that I cannot use on rural roads, or fit my son and his friends into, let alone all our sporting gear, will show me you have not done any research on me, your target audience, so I will head over to a blog that understands my needs. That is fine, I was probably never your target audience if sports cars is your niche, but understanding this is crucial.

So while I like to listen to Bliss n Esso, I would stick out like a sore thumb if I was in their audience, however, I have no doubt I would fit right in at a Meatloaf concert. I am more than happy to fit in with my target audience.

As always let me know if you enjoyed this blog and more importantly if it was of any use to you.

Denise.