Knowing Your Target Audience Needs.

byMHainsworth

1.9K followers

8 years ago

This is a phrase that is used a lot in WA training, well generally in marketing really, and maybe we hear it too often without really knowing what it means.

I was reminded of this recently on my own website, when I had used the phrase. So I thought I would jot down some of the ideas that I have come across to help me do this, and share them with you.

I also hope you can add others below, to give newbies more ideas about how to understand their target niche audience better.

One of the reasons that WA really works for me is because my main niche site is content marketing and SEO, so by default part of my target audience are people like yourselves who are setting up in online marketing.

This means the way I use the WA forums and questions might be slightly different because for me this an example of an industry forum, where people of similar needs meet.

One of the ways I get content is to look at the questions people ask, and then aim to write a piece that will answer that. This way I know if one person is asking it will probably be asked by others.

I do the same thing on Quora, where people ask questions about anything, but I just look at SEO and marketing questions. Like WA you can follow or keep track of questions and read other responses.

The other area that is useful is the comments section, I use site comments here at WA because again having a niche that everyone can relate to I usually get great comments on this site because they are genuine. Sometimes points are raised or questions asked and this leads me to think I could write a separate post on that.

The thing about niche marketing is that your area is quite small, so every idea does generally tend to translate into a separate post or article.

For my other niche site though I'm still looking for ideas for a target group, but I do find Twitter useful for seeing the type of content out there and there is a #horsehour discussion on a Monday evening to see what's new. Facebook groups are another way for some niches (I have one for the equine site, haven't seen a role for it for the SEO one).

This is all in addition to the generic ways of finding out questions by using the Google automated search questions that appear (Kyle's alphabet soup technique), and looking at other niche related articles to see what they are writing about.

So what other ideas would you share about how you get to know your target audience?

Thanks, Marie