The very first step to developing search engine optimized web content for your business is to know your target audience. Knowing the gender, age range, ethnicity, income level, interests, and attributes of your primary audience member will help you to understand what they are searching for online.
4 Steps to Identifying Your Audience
Step 1: Identify Your Selling Points
What makes your business special? What is it that you offer to customers? Why would someone come to you for the products or services you offer? Identifying your key selling points is the first step to identifying your audience. Knowing what makes you unique will help you to understand what types of people are choosing you over your competitors.
Step 2: Examine Your Existing Audience
Take a look at your current customers and analyze who they are, what they like, and how they make purchasing decisions. Begin analyzing your current audience with these tactics:
- Collect emails from purchases and send follow-up surveys
- Invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
- Collect demographic information at the point of purchase
Step 3: Ask an Outsider’s Opinion
We often have a blind spot when it comes to analyzing our own company and what our audience expects. We all become so immersed in our internal jargon and processes that we have a hard time stepping back and looking at things from an outsider’s perspective.
Enlist outsiders, like third party vendors, friends and family, or a random sample of people to provide insight on your company, services, and practices. Of course you will want to take some of this information with a grain of salt. However, certain feedback can really get your wheels turning!
Step 4: Create an Audience Profile
Your next step is to create an audience profile for each of your audience members. Have some fun with this part! Come up with names for each of your key audience members and list their attributes, goals, and what they may be typing into search engines. Make sure to keep these in mind when setting up your Google Analytics account. This will also come in handy when you add new people to your marketing team and are tasked with introducing them to your company!
If you need assistance with identifying your target audience for search engine optimization, please contact Informatics. Our SEO professionals are happy to help!
