As an online marketer, the biggest stumbling block is to deliver content that your audience appreciates. The sole objective of marketers on online platforms is to drive traction and audience engagement through the publication of quality contents that are useful for the online audience. But how can you really know the kind of contents preferred by your audience? This is why it is so much important to know about your audience in depth.
Even after making your audience engaged with the content does not help your business as long as it does not convert into the business output. Do the scores of users that come and use your contents really become customers of your business? Another important consideration is the frequency of use and interaction. How many of your audience really visit your website frequently? How long they really spend on your website? Do they just leave your website as quickly as they appear? All these considerations are important to measure the audience engagement and traction.
To ensure these aspects to take positive effect on your online marketing campaign you need to know your audience, more vividly the better. How to meet this challenge of knowing your audience with a systematic and methodical approach? Here we provide some useful tips.
Create a user persona
A user persona refers to the gross characteristics of a user personality. The user can be a male or female. He or she can belong to different cultural and ethnic background. The socio-economic status may vary along with buying capacity. Finally, the typical user demands depending upon all these factors can terribly vary. With a user persona, you come to know all the qualities that constitute your user personality. A user persona requires considerations of several different aspects of a buyer personality. If your business has a broad range of products or services to offer across several geographic regions and price range there can be the number of different user personas than a single one. Here below we provide some valuable considerations for creating user persona.
- First of all, you need to ask who will need your product most or to be more precise, who will find your product most useful?
- Secondly, you need to know the gender and age group of your user.
- Thirdly, you need to know typical online behaviour and attention span of your target user group.
- You need to know the cultural ethnic background your users normally belong to. It also depends on which market you are concentrating on geographically.
- Now you also need to know their economic condition and constraints as this would often be decisive as far as affordability is concerned.
- Now you need to know about their habits in handling device and typical platforms they access the web from. Do your users prefer mobile surfing or access through the native mobile app? Do your users mostly use iOS or stick to Android?
- You also need to know the type of contents preferred by your users. Do they prefer short video contents or have the habit of going through a dense body of text?
- Lastly, you need to have a fair amount of insights concerning their online behaviour and attention span. Can they stick to a piece of content until the very end or they just prefer to glance through the bold points? Knowing this is crucial for a content strategy that delivers up to the user preference and typical attention span.
Watch out for the audience of your competitors
Your competitor businesses catering to the same audience and clientele can really prove to be a valuable source of information and insights about your target user group or ideal audience. Simply by studying your competitors' audience in-depth, you can grab an array of valuable insights about your potential customers and users.
In this respect, we must advise you to know the difference with your competitors as well. For instance, both news media house catering news stories can differ in many respects about their focus areas and priorities. This is why, similarities withstanding, this difference between the competitors within a niche is also a crucial consideration.
How to know about your target audience in-depth just by deciphering the online presence and user interactions across the web pages of your competitors? Well, here we provide a few important tips.
- First of all, go to the competitors' social pages and watch out the audience profiles, interactions, repercussions, user generated contents and conversations. The social pages of a business offer an overall idea about its audience.
- Go to the competitors' business websites and watch out for the contents and how they garnered interactions and sharings. You also need to follow the comments under every piece of content to have a clear idea about audience preferences and distastes.
- Now you also need to take a deep look into the testimonials and user reviews across the web and social platforms to get a fair idea of the audience.
Doing market research
This is by far the most trusted and widely embraced way to becoming more knowledgeable about your audience. Yes, market research done by professionals can easily deliver you all the valuable information about your target audience in a systematic and methodical manner. Most important of all, the insights provided by market research firms come through time tested and proven methodologies and most relevant metrics. This is why market research outputs are likely to be more accurate and precise than the insights gathered through individual efforts.
- Market research in invincible in importance since it covers a wide spectrum of online platforms and businesses of that niche.
- The market research follows time-tested methodologies and metrics that already helped to garner valuable insights for other companies and businesses.
- Most reputed market research firms are dedicated to helping their clients gain the competitive business edge as it is crucial to secure their brand identity.
- When you go for industry certified and highly rated market research firms you easily ensure getting the most valuable insights about your target audience.
Knowing audience is a minimum prerequisite for your online business and it involves a rigorous process involving several considerations and metrics. Without knowing your audience at depth, your online business is very unlikely to deliver up to the user preferences and needs.