The most important task before web design is to identify your target audience for website. In short, who is the reader for your website. In short, to understand deeply on the reader for your website.
You might say that there are many different people will visit my website. Why should I look for the right target audience? Before that, let us understand what is target audience.
What is target audience meaning?
Your target audience is a specific group of people most likely interested with the products or services you sell. This group of people are having a similar trait.
In another words, your target audience is who you target with the marketing efforts.
Why knowing your target audience for website is important?
In short, it is important to know your target audience before designing your web because understand deeply on your target audience help you create tailored message and web pages or even advertisement that are effective so you can have a much better return on investment (ROI) in a long term.
There’s a saying. When you try to sell to everyone, you sell to no one.
According to Yahoo study, 54% of customers find personalized ads to be more engaging.
Based on Mckinsey Study, ads tailored to the clients needs can significantly increase ROI up to 8 times.
Many people made a mistake that they think they need a huge traffic into their website. In the end, they wasted their time and money as those traffics are irrelevant. It doesn’t generate any revenue for them.
You need a relevant traffic that able to generate revenue for you.
What is the Target Audience Types?
There is a lot of attributes that can be used in finding the right audience
Demographic – It shows you WHO buys your product or service
Gender
Gender is the major differentiation in demographic. Women and Men often having a different preference and thoughts. Women is more prone to emotional while men is more rational
Age
Age tells you a lot about the person interacting with your business. Whether your packaging or branding suitable for the age range. And also their spending behavior as a 35 years old person is having a better purchase power than a 20 years old.
Occupation
Occupation make a difference when you craft your marketing strategy. For example, a working mom vs a housewife. The value they have is different and their priority is different as well.
Marital Status
Marital status tells you their priority. For example, women married with kids will put their priority on their kids. And their spending behavior changed.
Household Income
Your pricing on products or services determine which income bracket you want to target. And this will affect your brand image whether is a premium and expensive or the other way round.
Geographic
Location
Location is important for few reasons. First it tells you where your customers are and how you can find then. Next, it tells you how you should approach certain segments for example people staying in city vs people staying in outskirt.
Preferred Language
It’s important to identify the language your customers speak. As it affects your overall website or even ads copywriting.
Psychographic – It shows you WHY they buy your product or service
Personalities
What is your target buyer like? Are they the type of person to research a product extensively before buying it? Or do they like to take risks and try something new? Knowing the personality traits of your target buyer can help you write better copywriting that appeals to them specifically. For example, extrovert vs introvert, emotional thinker vs logical thinker, spontaneous vs planner.
Lifestyles
Lifestyle is basically your prospect daily routine. For example, a full-time employee will have faster paced lifestyle compare to retiree or housewife. They want something quick and easy.
Interests
Interest basically is what they enjoy or interested in. This includes hobbies, media consumption habits and what occupies their time.
Social Class
Social class often affects how a consumers spend their money. For example, upper class are often spent money on luxuries items. They emphasize a lot on product quality and branding.
Opinions, attitudes and beliefs
Your target audience attitudes or beliefs tells you how they see the world. For example, some of the target audience would prefer to pay for a premium or organic product. And your packaging needs to be minimalist in the brown box to be appealing to them.
How to Define Your Target Audience: 7 Steps to Ask
1. Who are they?
When thinking about who might be your target audience for website. One way to find out is to monitor who follows, likes, shares and comments on your posts in social media like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Also you can based on the demographic factor to know who react mostly to your ads. Are they men or women and what is the age range.
2. Where does your target audience get information from?
When your target audience for website in research mode, where do they go find the answers they need? Are they getting it by searching in Google? Any particular blog? Books or Magazine?
You need to identify the best communication channels that suitable for your target audience and also try to talk in their language or using the jargon they use.
3. What are their biggest frustrations and challenges?
Truly understand and empathy your target audience with their frustrations and challenges are the most important key.
By knowing how they feel, you are able to create better products or services that suits them. And also better communicate to them by speaking on their pain points that you understood.
Prospect buy products or services when they feel understood. The logic is simple. When your prospect sees a testimonial from another customer that solved a similar problem like him, he will be highly likely to buy from you.
4. What are their hopes, dreams and desires?
Knowing your dream buyer’s hopes, dreams and desires help you to pain a beautiful world and life after using your products or services. In short, you show them their dream.
Here are some of the common desire:
People want to GAIN
- Health
- Time
- Money
- Popularity
- Leisure
- Improve appearance
- Comfort
- Self-confidence
- Pride of accomplishment
People want to BE
- Good parents
- Socially responsible
- Up to date
- Creative
- Outgoing
- Efficient
- Influential
- Proud of what they own
- Morally superior
5. What are their biggest fear?
What are your target audience for website deepest fears? What are they worry about that keep them away from achieving their goals?
Understand their fear is important in your copywriting. People are motivated more by pain than they are by pleasure. They are more motivated by fear of loss than they are by the desire to gain something.
Therefore, calling out their fears in your copy and ads is an incredibly important element to get your dream buyer to take action and motivate them to move away from what they fear most.
For example, life insurance are sell through fear. Buyer fear that their family will face financial hardship if anything happen to them.
6. What is their preferred form of communication?
Email? WhatsApp? Facebook Live? Telegram? This is a matter of where your audience wants you to communicate with them. The fundamental lesson here is to communicate with your customers where they already are. Don’t try and move them onto something that is more convenient for you rather than where they already are.
7. Who and what do they trust?
Trust is everything. Trust is the main factor that pushes a prospect into a customer. No one will purchase a product or service if they don’t trust you or your brand.
This is why reviews are so important. Review from the real customers are often the main factor other customer purchase from you.
Taking care of your relationship with your customers is important as they will spread about your brand online or to their closest 1.
Taking care of your relationship with your customers is important as they will spread about your brand online or to their closest 1.
What is target audience example?
This is example of target audience for website: Women, 30 to 35 years old. Living in Kuala Lumpur. Having bachelor’s degree and earn monthly income of RM 5,000 to RM 6,000. She is married and having kids. She usually gets information by Google or through Youtube. She is having a hard time trying to lose weight. She try many methods to lose weight but eventually the weights rebounded. She want to get slim so that she can looks good and be confident again. She also fear that her health is not good as she always feel tired when working. She want a solution that is quick and easy as she is busy with her career and family life.
Target Audience Tools to Research Deeply
1. Reddit – Place where conversation flows
Reddit is one of the best research tool. Reddit has over 52 million active users each day with over 200 countries, which means that your target audience most certainly spends time on that platform.
Reddit is completely free to use. It powers communities called subreddits where people discusses common topics. It is best place for marketer to look for opportunity.
To understand your audience on Reddit, search your keywords in the subreddit search tools. For example, if you were interested in fat loss.
2. Quora – The Question and Answer Tool
One of the best place to discover the problems and challenges your target audience are experiencing is Quora.
Quora is a great free tool for market research. Quora is a platform where user asking the question and getting their answer. It is once of the best platform to understand target audience mind. People ask questions, and other people – experts, content creators – answer them.
Use the search tool on Quora to search the keywords for your industry.
3. Amazon – The World’s Biggest Retailer
A market research tool list that best to understand customer needs to create a great product.
Amazon is a marketing diamond where you can read target audience minds because is a global market that buys from Amazon. You get to read the reviews of the products and the feedback from customers.
Start by searching and products you would like to research in the industry. For example, in the weight loss industry, you can search for fat loss supplements.
Amazon reviewers can be very detailed, so you’ll get insight into the language they use, the jargon they use. You get to understand their deepest fear, challenges their facing and dreams or hopes they want to achieve.
The good thing about Amazon reviews is that you always get to see the both sides. Negative and the positive.
For example this negative review, you get to understand their fear on the side effects. And what kind of side effects they are having. From here, you can based on this to create your product copywriting.
As for this positive review on the fat loss supplements, you can find out that people who undergo fat loss or diet always feeling hungry. People enjoy good product that helps control appetite and hunger without the side effects.
4. AnswerthePublic – All the searches in Google in question based
AnsweThePublic is a tool where it accumulate all the top searches with question based in Google.
From here, you get to know what your target audience question is. With this you can do a further research to create content for your target audience.
5. Facebook Group – Place where people hangout and talks
It is difficult to argue that Facebook has one of the biggest reach compare to other platform. Alost everyone you know uses Facebook. Which is why Facebook is one of the mind reading gold.
But don’t just look at Facebook profiles or pages. Facebook group are where the conversation flows.
Facebook groups are gathering places for people who are interested in a specific topic, and if you focus on targeted groups, you can see what they have discussed in the group.
Conclusion
Identifying the right target audience for website beforehand is very important. The more detailed your research are, the better copywriting you can write. In short, it will improve your return on investment in the long run.
