How To Clearly Define And Know Your Target Audience When Marketing Online
Online marketing has become one of the most popular advertising options available. It reaches a worldwide audience and is available 24 hours a day.
For this reason more and more potential customers are going online for a variety of reasons including researching products and services and making purchases.
As more and more consumers go online for these reasons, it is important for businesses to establish an online presence.
This is so important because failure to do so may result in their competitors gaining an edge over them in competing for sales.
While it is important for a business to begin online marketing campaigns; it is also important for these same businesses to realize basic advertising principles still exist and they cannot neglect these principles.
Most importantly those who advertise online have to be aware of who their target audience is and how to reach this audience.
As with any marketing campaign, business owners should do some market research before they launch their online marketing campaign.
The crux of any good digital marketing campaign is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables.
The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.
Ideally, this will involve hiring a digital marketing agency with a great deal of experience in conducting and evaluating this type of market research. The results of this research should determine the basic demographical information for the target audience. The results should also include information on how to reach this target audience.
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What this really means: it isn’t enough to know the demographics and location of your prospects. You have to know as much as possible about them, including their:
• Different Personality traits.
• Personal Interests.
• Upstanding Values.
• Different Opinions.
Knowing all of this will help you:
• Create an accurate list of topics and keywords to target.
• Make sure your set-up pages convert more effectively.
• Ensure your viewers have a great user experience.
• Optimize the content that you create
• Create he perfect message to cause your readers to take action.
• Search and connect with key influencers in your market.
A business that cannot afford to hire a Digital Marketing Agency to conduct this market research should still make an effort to obtain this information on their own.
This can be done through informal polls of current clients. This information may not be as comprehensive as the information obtained in a more formal study but it can still provide a great deal of insight into the best way to reach the target audience.
Once this information is obtained, it is important to tailor the marketing campaign to appeal to the target audience.
There are a number of different variables that can be modified to ensure the right message is reaching the right people in a manner they can understand and in which they can relate.
Some of the ways in which your marketing campaign can be tailored in this way include the aesthetics of your website or advertisements, your copy and the use of more advanced design features such as audio and visual or interactive tools.
If you think about building a business, your website would be a natural location to showcase everything about your business and product.
One way to build maximum awareness and recognition is by generating traffic to your website. So, your first objective would be to get, say, 100 visitors a day, and then, 1,000 visitors a week.
It takes a lot to differentiate your brand in today’s “me too” world of electronic business solutions. And it is very important to engage in such projects that will ensure that traffic is headed your way — consistently.
How:
• You have to hang out where your audience hangs out and sign out with your website details — answer relevant questions on Reddit, HackerNews, Quora etc., so that the audience learns of your expertise in the space.
• Display Call to Actions at different places on your website so that the visitors are engaged and are compelled to explore the website, rather than opt for an early exit.
• Be sure to invest in SEO efforts to drive organic search traffic to your website.
• Just as paid search is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic to your website, but businesses must be able to justify the expenses while measuring the outcome.
(Here’s a hack – you could experiment with a paid search channel like Google Adwords even before you build your product if you have the budget. This works well as a research tool, to see if the product you are building has demand and will sell).
What Type Of Audience Are You Targeting?
The aesthetic appeal of a website can greatly contribute to how the website is viewed by the members of the target audience. A website that is designed to attract the attention of an older generation with more conservative tastes should include muted colors, clean design, and conservative graphics.
This will help to ensure the target audience enjoys the website. Conversely, if you are looking to appeal to a younger audience with more liberal viewpoints you might choose to design the website with bold colors, eye-catching graphics, and creative design features.
The copy you include on your website should also take your target audience into consideration. Consider the examples of a conservative and a liberal audience listed above to create a better understanding of how the copy on your website can appeal to the target audience.
When marketing to a more conservative audience, the copy should be tailored to use formal language and use facts to back up viewpoints.
However, when you are marketing to a more liberal audience or a younger audience you can consider using less formal language which is likely to appeal to the target audience.
You can also focus more on emotion to express viewpoints.
For instance, if you have a 1,000 potential leads visiting your site, how do you familiarize them with your product/ service?
How do you ensure that they know what they have signed up for?
Customers rely on their common sense of familiarity in choosing a familiar and known brand.
How do you feature there? Simple – meaningful and engaging content.
Content Marketing found its origins in 1891. More than a century ago, August Oetker, the German inventor of baking powder – Backin, sold packages to households.
What made Backin a familiar brand was the little recipes printed on the back of these packages. In 1911, he published his cookbook and over 100 years, it reached a global audience with about 19 million copies. That was the first example of content marketing.
It’s 2019, and that’s still pretty much how we could do it too along with the added advantage of using social media.
With the right message and relevant content, across mediums, marketers should focus their attention on their target market.
How:
• Tailored Messaging for signing up the right kind of users and in turn attracting the right traffic is very important. You would need to be specific about what your product is and who it caters to in as many places as possible. This could be on the website, in-app, email welcome messages etc.
• Effective content marketing is in an essential marketing tool in a way that provides useful, relevant and valuable information
• Customer/User Engagement via social media
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Your Website When Marketing Online To Your Target Audience
Finally, when a website is created for the purposes of online marketing it is important for the design of the website to appeal to the target audience.
Over the past decade, web design has become a platform for designers to show off their impressive skills and the latest trends to the whole of the internet.
However, websites shouldn’t just look pretty; they should also be functional and work with the target audience in mind. When it comes to designing a website, the target audience of the website is often forgotten about.
A client may end up with a state of the art website, but if it doesn’t appeal to those crucial customers, then you might as well not have one at all. Matching your website and design to your target audience is an important step if you want to turn your website into a conversion machine.
Now that you have a clear target audience in mind, you can begin to design your website around them by making sure you’re using the right typography, layout, and style. All of these things will affect how users interact with your website and if they end up buying or leaving straight away.
Therefore, getting these design elements to match your target audience’s preferences is essential if you want high levels of interaction and endless conversions.
As you should probably well know, colour is a powerful tool especially when it comes to marketing and design. It has the ability to influence a user’s mood, thoughts, and even emotions. Deciding on the main colour can be tricky.
The most important thing is to make sure the colour matches the image of your business and the message you are trying to get across.
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The next thing you’ll want to think about is the overall layout of the website. Although all websites should be easy to read and navigate, your target audience will determine how advanced your navigation should be.
Some target audiences will prefer little navigation options with simple to click buttons. Other target audiences will, however, prefer long drop-down menus that allow them to access the exact page they one.
If you understand your audience enough, then you should know which one they will like.
In terms of the actual layout of elements on your web page, age often is a major factor. Young children and older audiences will want simple-to-use and easily-understandable layouts with lots of white space.
Teenagers, young professionals, and the tech-savvy audiences will want something a bit more complex and detailed in order to keep them entertained. Understanding how your audience reacts to layouts is vital if you want them to stay on your website.
Font sizes are also important when it comes to designing your website. If set too small, users might struggle to read it, especially older users. Set too big and your website suddenly isn’t serious anymore. Finding the right size of the font to use is just as important as finding the actual font.
If you have a younger audience or you’re trying to explain something complicated to users, then having spaced out paragraphs with minimum text is ideal.
However, if your target audience is consisting of sophisticated users, then they’ll probably prefer reading pages and pages of text. Whatever style you decide to go for, it’s also important you include lots of images to help support the content.
Images are a must-have for websites, and they will often be the first thing that users look at upon landing on a page. Making sure you have the right images in the correct style is important if you want users to pay attention to them.
Some audiences will prefer real photographs of certain products and services, while some will prefer illustrations to do the job. Identifying which your target audience prefers is essential as it will have a significant impact on the images on your website.
Now that you know how to design the perfect website for your target audience, put all the pieces together and get designing!
You may wish to include audio and video clips on your website but these clips should appeal to the target audience. For example, if your website sells skateboards you might consider incorporating audio clips from punk rock bands as opposed to country music bands.
There may be some skateboarders who enjoy country music but in general punk rock music more closely represents the skating culture. Keeping these details in mind is very important for online marketing.
Knowing your target audience matters more than you might think. Don’t assume that everyone is a potential customer.
Instead, narrow down the specific people who will not only want your product or service but also have the means and motivation to buy it.
Conduct customer research. Communicate with your audience via your blog and social media platforms. Test content in other places, such as guest posts.
The more information you collect about your audience, the better you can serve them.
