Understanding Your Target Audience: Tips and Tools for Bloggers
If you’re a blogger, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your target audience. Knowing who your content is intended for can greatly influence how you approach content creation, from the topics you cover to the tone and style you use. In this article, we’ll explore what a target audience is, why it’s important to know yours, and how to identify a viable target audience for your blog. We’ll also provide some helpful tools for getting a handle on this information.
What Is a Target Audience?
Your target audience is the group of people for whom you’re creating content. To identify your target audience, think about the person who will be reading your blog and subsequently making a purchase or subscribing to your email newsletter. What demographic information do they have in common? Common demographic info used to inform target audiences include age, gender, location, income, education, marital status, profession, and whether or not they have kids.
Why Do I Need to Know My Target Audience?
Knowing your target audience can help you make better decisions about how you write your content. If you know who you’re writing for, that can greatly inform everything from the tone of voice you write in, the vocabulary you use, the pop culture references you lean on, and so forth. Basically, knowing your audience means writing more precise content that better speaks to those you’re wanting to reach.
How to Identify a Viable Target Audience
To identify those that would most benefit from your content, service, product, or all of the above, you need to think in specific terms. And that means asking yourself some questions.
Do Some Deep Thinking
First thing’s first, put on your thinking cap. What does your product or service provide? What problems does it solve and what pain points does it meet? Your goal here is to identify who your product or service is intended for.
Evaluate Your Competitors
Your next step is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. This can be as simple as going directly to competitor websites and seeing how they write content. What tone do they use? What sorts of calls-to-action? How do they interact with people on social media?
Evaluate Analytics
Analytics can tell you a lot about your target audience as well. Google Analytics, specifically, is invaluable here, as it can provide detailed reports that contain demographic details about who has been visiting your blog already. With it, you can view the age, gender, and location of those who have visited. This will also allow you to view social media stats about who is interacting the most with your posts as well as the time of day that garners the most traction.
Create Buyer or Reader Personas
Once you’ve gathered a good amount of data about your target audience, you can begin to develop reader personas. This involves using the information you know about who reads your blog and catering your content to that individual. You may find that you need to create more than one reader persona, as more than one “type” of person visits your blog.
What If I Have More Than One Target Audience?
Sometimes, you may find that you need to write for more than one type of persona. This will mean creating profiles or reader personas for multiple people.
Tools to Find Your Target Audience
Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and VerticalResponse are all tools that can help you identify your target audience. Google Analytics provides detailed reports that contain demographic details about who has been visiting your blog already. Facebook Insights can tell you detailed demographic info. VerticalResponse is a survey service that allows you to gather feedback from your target audience in real-time.
Conclusion
Understanding your target audience is essential for bloggers who want to create content that resonates with their readers. By doing some deep thinking, evaluating your competitors, and analyzing analytics, you can identify a viable target audience for your blog. Creating buyer or reader personas can help you cater your content to that individual. And using tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and VerticalResponse can help you gather feedback from your target audience in real-time.
