How to Classify a Website's Audience - Kalkine Media

If you want your website to work and your content to be relevant, you need to know your website audience. It doesn’t make sense to try to appeal to everyone, and it is better to invest your money, time and energy in a target audience.

Target audience analysis has many benefits. You can find and target the audience that may be interested in your product or service, craft personalised content for them, and develop long-term relationships. Your marketing strategy will be more cost-effective, you’ll be more competitive, and your conversion rates will improve.

Image 1; https://unsplash.com/photos/hpjSkU2UYSU

Identify your audience

Demographics are important if you plan to share and promote content on social media. Age, gender, income and location, for example, are just some of the important demographics to consider.

While defining demographics is important, you also need to think about the kind of people you’re catering to, what they like/dislike, their problems, and so on. This is more subjective information than the demographic data – it includes their attitudes, interests, opinions and aspirations.

Classify your website target audience

Audience insights are available on all the major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. For example, you can understand more about your Facebook Page fans by looking in the Facebook Ads Manager: Audience Insights.

On website.criteria.com, you will find a useful website audience classification tool. You fill in details such as the relevant attributes of your audience, what type of devices they’re using, and where and when they’re using them.

The more details listed, the better the chances for improving website content for small businesses. It’s only when you really know your audience that you can design appropriate content. Make it an audience website and not a website for the audience.

Ask the right questions

Think of some checklist questions such as “How much does your reader know?” and “what will the reader do with the information?” This enables you to design your content with the right style, tone, readability, quantity and level of detail.

For example, a Y-generation age group needs content that is informal, brief, in plain language with a clear structure and accompanied by images or videos.

If your website audience consists of students, they may be looking for tools or services to help them with their studies. You could share resources like eduClipper, which allows them to collect information and share it with previously created groups.

Image 2: https://unsplash.com/photos/ra4vJwxnvAo

Create user scenarios

Building the profile of website audiences helps with getting inside their heads and understanding their motivations. Creating user scenarios can help you to imagine how your audience will use your products or services.

For example, a social media manager may be looking for tools to help grow Instagram followers, and a writer may be looking for advice on how to make money with online writing.

Create personas

Creating personas is probably the most creative part of your target audience analysis. This is where you create a fictional person with the attributes of your target audience.

Using Hubspot’s Make My Persona tool, you can create a buyer persona that your whole company can use to market and sell. You start by choosing a name and selecting an avatar to help you start thinking about the persona like a real person.

Perhaps, you won’t be able to cover all your customers with one persona. If you’re selling office equipment, for example, you may want to target office workers, HR departments and office managers.

Other buyer persona templates you can choose from are Marketo’s personas cheat sheet, User Persona Creator by Xtensio and Buyer Persona Template from Demand Metric.

Conduct user surveys

Conducting customer surveys seem to be a good way to get into the minds of consumers. You should define the goals of your survey, who you want to reach and then decide how to reach them.

You may want to reach visitors to your website, people who have bought your product before, your social media followers etc. You could send a survey to your email list, embed it into a blog post or share it on social media.

It’s possible to use many popular tools to create your survey, such as this great template from Survey Monkey.

Talk to your social followers

If you want to find easy ways to engage your followers, you have to start relevant conversations. It is even better if you can engage them over what they are already talking about.

For example, join a Facebook Group where people discuss issues relevant to your niche and contribute engaging comments. It’s like showing up to a party organised by someone else and being engaging enough to make new friends.

A final word

By the end of this process, you should have detailed demographic and psychographic data, a few well-crafted personas and a list of all the relevant pain points you have identified. Once you’ve done this, you should have a very good idea of what type of content is most appropriate for your website audiences. This gives you the highest chance to engage them, convert them and improve your bottom line.

Author Bio:

Jeremy Reynolds is an education expert and an academic writer. He loves working with students and enriching their life through technological interventions. In his free time, he reads, practices yoga and plays guitar. He can be reached via Twitter.