Internet marketing specialists often have one professional “disease” that prevents them from getting really good results. It is an excessive concentration on the technical part of the site, different metrics and indicators, which eventually leads to ignoring what is really important. Namely – the interests of people who are the target audience of the site and business.
It is on the quality, volume and level of satisfaction of the audience depends on whether your resource will be profitable. And this is equally true for commercial resources and content projects.
Good technical optimization is no longer a surprise to anyone, but few people are able to work with usability, conversion and creation of added value landing pages. This requires a good understanding of the target audience (CA) for which everything is being done, and may become the very killer-feathers that will allow you to make your way to the Top.
Questions and answers, plus a little bit of a math
Understanding the target market and potential customers requires answers to a number of questions. They can seem quite simple to you. But try to get clear and unambiguous answers to them and you will realize that everything is not as easy as it seems at first glance.
- Who already visits your site, buys goods or services that you offer.
- What problems they solve thanks to your product, which is the main motivation for making a purchase decision.
- Why do customers choose you over competitors? What’s the big deal that you’re offering is that the customer makes the decision in your favor.
- What else can you offer on your website that would be useful to your target audience, but not on competitors’ websites.
For each item you can make clarifications, expanding the list of questions, and then look at the site through the eyes of the visitor. And it is necessary to look not only from the standpoint of what is already there, but also to try to understand what is missing. And this is a manual job, automated tools will not help you.
And now let’s look at examples of how you can get a good idea of what your audience lives and use it to improve the site.
We’re studying the analytics on the site
If your site has already progressed, has a certain age and attendance, statistics on it can be a real storehouse of useful information. Google Analytics and Yandex:
- the demographic profile of the audience;
- geography of transitions (countries and cities);
- Distribution of traffic by device type (PC and mobile);
- popularity of individual pages;
- Failure rates, viewing times and other behavioral metrics;
- conversion data for each page.
Going out into the fields: forums and communities
The best way to study the target audience is to do so in areas of natural habitat in large numbers
Thematic forums and community sites are suitable for such purposes. It is much more convenient to look for information here than in social networks.
Social networks and YouTube
Facebook groups and popular VK publics are also excellent sources of information for analysis and inexhaustible source of ideas for content planning and website refinement.
Layaks and cherries are quite good as a metric for assessing the popularity of a particular material. It will simply be necessary to adapt the chosen topic to the format of websites.
We study niche leaders (and not only our own)
The presence of competitors gives one valuable bonus – there is someone who will learn from, and you can adopt the best practices. Those of them, who have sites with age and have high attendance, probably already conducted enough experiments to understand the real needs of their audience.
Gather a list of sites from the Top on a few of the most valuable in your subject keywords and analyze them on the following points:
- structure and design of landing pages, information blocks used;
- if there is an article/blog section on which topics materials are published;
- what content is published on social media and in which ones.
The first thing we’re looking for is what’s missing
In the competitive niches of the top sites are often very similar to each other, as their landing pages have a similar structure and use similar elements. The problem is that often the owners of sites just copy them into each other, not wanting to experiment and implement something new.
And all the more so, few people bother to investigate the effectiveness of the work done.
Introducing changes and tracking the effect
For planning future changes on the site well suited prototyping services that allow you to make a quick schematic outline of the layout of the page, which is then transferred to the designer for drawing.
It is better to introduce changes gradually, then to measure in analytics the received effect on each of pages. To trace it is necessary first of all such information as:
- Change of visibility and attendance of the page;
- Analysis of behavioral factors (failure rate, time spent on the page);
- Change of conversion rate and achievement of goals.
It doesn’t just record statistics on a page, but records the actions of visitors, which can then be viewed in video format. It is possible to understand exactly how the audience reacts to this or that change on the site. This postalysis, combined with an iterative approach, allows you to find really working solutions that can then be scaled up.
A good Internet marketer in our time should be to some extent and a psychologist who understands what kind of audience is really valuable to him and can fully satisfy his needs. If you haven’t yet started a full-fledged study of your audience, I hope this article will encourage you to take your first steps in this direction.
And you can be sure that in the future such an investment will pay off in full!