Every audience is unique. It doesn't matter if your website is almost identical your competitor's website, your audience is going to have some unique attributes. Learning about these details will help you engage your customers in a more meaningful way.
Give these strategies a try.
The better you know your audience, the greater the chance that you'll be able to satisfy their needs and solve their pain points. Thankfully, it's easier than ever to get to know customers.
Here are some strategies for uncovering hidden details about your target audience.
Check Out Individual Social Media Profiles
Social media is a gift. If you don't continually remind yourself of this fact, you may start to take it for granted. One of the neatest things you can do is get to know individual customers. If you notice someone interacting with one of your social media accounts, click on their profile and do some digging. By studying their pictures, likes, followers, and posts, you can start to paint a picture of what sort of person they are. Do this enough times with different customers and you won't' have to guess what your target audience wants.
This is something Our Organic Wedding does really well. Check out this recent blog post on incorporating cats into your wedding. They didn't randomly come up with this topic. They did some digging and found out that their target audience really likes cats. As such, they figured that a topic on incorporating cats into a wedding would be valuable.
Browse Message Boards and Forums
In addition to social media, it can be helpful to browse message boards and forums that your target audience frequents. On these websites, you get a chance to see what sort of in-depth discussions your audience is having. You also get to see what answers other users are providing. This tells you about the pain points your audience has, as well as who your most educated and invested customers are.
Study Website Data
Google analytics is your best friend when it comes to uncovering hidden insights about your audience. The problem is that most businesses get overwhelmed by the wealth of data. Don't let this happen to you.
Under your Google Analytics account, there's a tab for Audience Reports. The Audience Reports section has 13 different tabs that reveal information like demographics (race, gender, age, etc.), interests (affinity categories), behavior (new vs. returning, engagement, etc.), technology (browser and network used), and much more. Studying this info will provide some concrete, objective data for you to build on.
Do You Know Your Audience?
There's a huge difference between knowing someone and knowing someone. Consider your past dating history. If you're like most people, you have three categories. There are people you casually dated once or twice. There are a couple of people you dated for an extended period of time. And there's your spouse. A case could be made that you know the people you went on one or two dates with, but you don't know them nearly as well as the people you dated for months or years at a time. Furthermore, you don't know the people you dated for an extended period of time as intimately as you know your spouse.
The same is true with your customers. You might know a couple of customers who you've done business with in the past, but do you know them intimately if you've never done any research on them? The goal is to really know your audience like the back of your hand. Thanks to Google, social media, and a plethora of other resources, it's possible to know your audience better than any business has in the past. Don't miss this opportunity!
