Know Your Audience — Who Are You Really Targeting?
By: Shafi Khan
Tags: Internet Marketing, Audience, Blogging Tips, Marketing, SEO

The most important rule when it comes to producing content is to remember you produce it for your readers, not for your own satisfaction. Therefore, you always need to keep at the back of your mind who you are writing for.

If your audience (readers) are in their late teens and early twenties, then your style and tone can be more colloquial and lighter than if you write for financial specialists or lawyers.

Expect the obvious like formality of texts or style, you should carefully consider what your audience looks for and what their interests are. It will make much easier for you to gauge what range of topics you should cover on your blog once you got to know your audience.

Also, it is understandable that if you are an expert in a field, you’re likely to use jargon and industry-specific words. However, be aware your audience might not be as familiar with terminology as you are.

Then, if you happen to use terms that are not self-explanatory, explain them shortly in a bracket or in a short glossary list. That will make your readers appreciate your efforts even more.

Moreover, if you use various sources, quote them in your post including links. It will allow your audience to do further research on the topic with greater ease. They will surely appreciate information being served to them on a silver plate. It’s a rare thing nowadays!

Understanding Your Audience

I can guarantee every day you will learn something new about your audience. Either it will be something obvious or a massive breakthrough you wouldn’t even anticipate. Your audience are your readers and your readers decide what they want to read and how they want to access the content.

Judging by the topic you cover on your blog, you can roughly gauge who your audience is and what sort of expectations they have. However, to get a better understanding of your audience’s interests and behaviour, you can use online tools available free of charge, such as Google Analytics, bitly, Google Trends, Social Mention or How Sociable.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is probably the most well-known and widely used analytics platform available on the market. If you run your own blog, it is inevitable one day you will need to start using Google Analytics. Shall not be afraid of all those strangely looking metrics and values, Google Analytic is not as complicated as it may seem at first.

In order to start analysing trends occurring within your audience’s behaviour (I assume you set your Google Analytics account up when you started blogging), you should concentrate on the ‘Audience’ section (please see the screenshot below). What can you find out about your audience from this section?

Languages your audience speak

Countries/Territories where your audience is based (or even the cities they live in)

Technology your audience uses

If your audience accesses your blog on mobile devices

Plus — demographics and interest reporting Demographics — a reporting that analyses your website traffic taking into account

gender split and age groups within your audience. Essentially, it compares male versus female visitors’ behaviours. Also, it allows you to analyse your visitors’ behaviour by age groups, i.e. 18–24, 25–34, 34–44, 45–54, etc.

It might appear this sub-section does not provide an extended analysis of your audience demographic split; however those basis metrics like gender and age can give you pretty good understanding of your audience’s profile.

Interests — along with the demographics reporting, the Google interest reporting is a relatively new feature in the Google Analytics suite. This reporting will help you to establish a broader spectrum of your audience’s interests. Furthermore, the data might point out other segments you haven’t targeted yet. This reporting analyses the following:

Affinity Categories (behaviour by affinity categories) group users on broader scale. Affinity Categories broaden the scope to identify users in terms of lifestyle; e.g. Foodies, Sports Enthusiasts or Technology addicts.

In-Market Categories (behaviour by in-market categories) identify groups of users who are in the market for specific product categories; e.g. users actively browsing for a specific type of product/service/phrase (an iPad, content marketing or even a GP in a local area).

Other Categories (behaviour by other interest categories) — categorise areas of interest based on the type of content users consume, along with how recently and frequently they consume (browsers and devices the visitors use as well as the websites they visit).

User flow

User flow is a rather interesting feature. It’s a visual representation of the journey of the certain groups of visitors on your blog/website. It will allow you to determine how your visitors move within the website and where they exit it.

This representation will help you to assess how the visitors behave on your blog. If they drop (exist the page) significantly at any specific stage, it will point out where the problem lies. You then know which page you should audit and improve so the drop-off will reduce.

User flow classifies users in the groups country-, city-, region-, browser-, technology-wise. This capability is very useful when it comes to graphic design and blog/website optimisation. It can also be used to pick up technical errors on your blog (e.g. some Java or Flash elements not working or not loading).

Bitly

Bitly is a handy, little tool that enables to shorten links to your posts as well as it gives you a tracking and measuring capability. Shortened links are usually more sharable on social media and look better from the aesthetic point of you. Also, a few months ago (early 2014) Bitly introduced a free of charge service that enables users to customise shortened links — which is very useful as you can set up a customised link that will be highly sharable and easily memorable.

When it comes to using Bitly for analytics, the most useful feature is an ability to measure traffic coming from the specific shortened link. This tracks where the visitors come from (country/region) as well as when they click on the link (times of day and dates). This helps to understands when your audience checks your blog or social media profiles to establish the optimal posting time. If your audience is the most active in the evening, then schedule your posts to go live that time. It’ll increase their exposure and generate a better chance of conversion.

Google Trends

Google Trends lists current global and regional search trends. It won’t impact your traffic directly but it’ll assist you with identifying which topics are of interests to people browsing the web and what key search terms are trending at the specific time (this feature is very useful for optimising your SEO). It won’t let you analyse your audience directly; however it can give you some ideas for topics to write about.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a real time search and analytics platform that allows you to browse for key terms/words of interest to you. It lists trending terms, too. You can search for any keywords in a few media categories (like: blogs, miniblogs, events, news, images, etc.). The interesting part is how results are analysed by the platform. It shows the strength of a specific keyword in percentage as well as the sentiment attached to it.

Furthermore, it reveals the top users associated with the term (you can consider them trend setters for a relevant category). Plus, you can find out what hashtags are trending which can be useful when sharing your content on social media. What can you learn from Social Mention? Mainly, what kind of sentiment your audience has for specific key terms (e.g. positive, negative or neutral).

That’s important as you don’t want to write positive things about issues most people have negative opinions about. Also, it enables you to identify people who are the most influential ‘players’ within your key topic areas. Learn from them and see how their content is written and structured.

Emails/Comments from your audience

If you really want to know what your audience thinks, do not forget about the simplest but the most personal way to get to know them. Read and reply to emails and comments from your readers. It is often very straightforward and the most honest feedback you can get. So listen to those voices.

However, don’t bother with online trolls — they will always try to spoil it for you. Remember, you do not run your blog for them but for your ‘true’ followers.

Key Tips

#1. Identify who your audience really is — numerous freely available online tools like Google Analytics or bitly can be of great help. They will enable you to understand habits and interests of your audience as well as identify potential target audience.

#2. Target segments you would not necessarily expect to be within your reach; especially those ones identified as potential audience from the analysis and reporting you’ve conducted.

#3. Listen to the feedback from your readers and make sure you follow up and improve what’s lacking.

#4. Show the audience your ‘human’ face — let them know you do your best. You may from time to time make a small faux pass but don’t give up!

About Author:

Thanks to Brandon Baker from Optiux Marketing for sending this guest post. You can check his website at Optiux.com and follow him on Twitter @optiux.