Who are you trying to connect with, influence or sell to?

The response of your website audience to its content will determine how successful your website is. 

So its critical that you do whatever it takes to present your organisation, its products or services from their point of view. 

Sometimes, you need to bend over backwards!

You need to get know your audience and to document their requirements thoroughly.

It’s all about them — their questions, problems, needs and desires are all vital factors when planning website content.

By addressing these, you’ll be winning on two counts:

1. You will improve your chances of gaining a new customer and
   
2. Greatly enhance the likelihood of search engines matching your content with the words and phrases being used in internet searches. Search engine ‘spiders’ are programmed to source and index information through the internet. They rank that information depending on its quality and relevance. 

Take a keen interest in the nature and composition of your target markets and cement in place a solid cornerstone for building a successful website!

Profile Your Audience

It would be difficult to design and build anything without knowing who was going to use it.

That applies to websites too.

Before you can make any meaningful progress, you’ll need to know intimately who you’re attempting connect with, influence or sell to.

On the internet it is difficult, though not impossible, to target any more than 2 or 3 target audiences on one website.  This is a generalisation, but for the purposes of this site’s target markets, that suggestion applies.  It means however, that you can afford to be thorough in your audience profiles.

You need to think long and hard about the nature of your customers and construct a ‘typical customer’ profile.

Here are some of the characteristics and features you should know:

• Age & sex
• Occupation
• Geographic area
• Problems & questions, needs or desires
• Likely words and phrases used
• Lifestyle habits — leisure, interests. Likes and dislikes.
  

Sourcing this information is not as difficult as it sounds.  If your marketing department or consultant has researched your target markets, you have much of this data at your fingertips.

If you’re a smaller enterprise, talk to the people who take orders.  You may be surprised how much they know and how pleased they are to become involved!

If you’re looking to improve your exiting site’s performance, look at the email inquiries coming through.  What questions are they asking and what is their language like? What do those two things alone tell you?

You may need to examine your site to establish why they had to ask in the first instance.

Picture Your Audience

Keep your audience close to your heart — and to your desk.  Very likely, it is they who are paying your salary or commissions!

A great way of keeping them in front of you (and front of mind) is to photograph someone in your typical audience ‘range’ and have a quantity of posters printed.  You can source these pictures from image websites on the internet quite cheaply and digital printing is inexpensive now too.  Attach them to the walls around your marketing and sales offices.  Name these valued customers (just ‘Sarah’ or ‘Mike’ will do) and list under the head and shoulders photograph, who they are and what their needs are.  Include their psychographic (lifestyles, habits) attributes along with the demographic data. That’s vital information.

Once you know a lot about your target markets and have ‘personalised’ them, they’re a lot easier design content for and to influence.  And influencing your audience is probably why you’re paying to launch or maintain a website.

Doesn’t that make good sense?

Unless your website acknowledges and addresses the needs, concerns and problems of these people (i.e. your target markets), it will not succeed and neither will you. 

It’s about as simple as that.