Defining your target audience

Your website is part of your marketing, and helps you bring and sell your products or services to people who want to buy from you. These people are your target audience, and your website is much more effective if you know, and can define, who this audience is.

Your target audience is not everyone

In your potential desire to exclude no one from your marketing, it is a mistake to think your target audience is everyone. If you really think your target audience is everyone then you are not thinking clearly enough about who your business is really meant to be selling to.

You can also waste time and money in marketing to everyone as your messaging and content will be so unfocused it will resonate on a very shallow level, probably with many people who have no interest in your services.

Connecting with people on a deeper level is the secret to effective marketing and you can’t do that if you are talking to the general population; you need to use the messaging and tone of voice that’s right for your particular target audience.

Even if you could afford such a far-reaching campaign, there is little point in attracting ten million visitors a month to your website when only a tiny percentage of those are actually going to buy from you. Concentrate instead on the tiny percentage, think about what they want and instead aim to attract and grow that percentage.

How to define your target audience

You need to start by thinking about the characteristics that make your audience different to other audiences. Ask yourself: who are your customers, typically?

Start with the basics, such as:

• Age range – if you don’t know the age range of your customers, do some research, look at your competitors for clues, and feedback from your own customers. Consider a customer feedback survey.  
• Geographical location – is your target audience local, or does it live in particular parts of the country? Don’t market to a location you’ll find it hard to supply to. 
• Demographic – consider gender, family and partner status, occupation and income, so you can get a feel for who the people are in your target audience. 
• Personality-type – consider what type of person makes up your audience. What are the issues they care about? How do they spend their time? What types of brands are they likely to buy from? And, most importantly, what kind of messaging resonates with them?

These are all areas to consider that will help you to narrow down your audience and create the kind of content and messaging on your website that appeals to your potential customers.

What’s your USP for your target audience?

Think about what makes your offer special to your audience: your unique selling point, or USP. What do your target audience want that you provide? In other words, what do you do to make their lives better?

Once you’ve defined your USP to your target audience you can get a more specific idea of the language and design you can use that will appeal, connect and attract them.

Customers expect personalisation

In this competitive world, which is becoming evermore so, customers expect personal connection and attention to their needs. If you can’t demonstrate this in your marketing, and make that effort to understand your audience, you will be lost in the competition.

You can get customer information

Four out of five marketers say customer data is everything; without data you have no insight. If you don’t have customer data, go about getting it. From surveys to feedback requests, to actual sales follow-up calls, there are a myriad of ways you can obtain your customer data, not to mention social media research.

Don’t start to make your website, until you know who your target audience is

Do all of the above first to define and understand your target audience, and then go about the business of setting up your new website.

Remember, it could all be effort and expense wasted if you are not thinking about who your website is for, and at the end of the day, you want it to improve your bottom line, which means sales, not just hordes of visitors who don’t buy. 

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