Technical knowledge will certainly get you somewhere in the world of search engine optimisation, but without a good understanding of your audience, you’ll never be able to truly reach your digital marketing potential. Much of this is due to audiences being more complex than you might imagine – people don’t necessarily make consistent or logical decisions, after all. Businesses will need to rely on a combination of keywords, conversion, UX (user experience) and search engine optimisation to properly reach their audience, and it can take lot of work to make it happen. In this article, we provide some great advice to help kickstart your audience-focused campaigns in the future.
Who are your customers?
If you ask any of the big digital marketing agencies in Australia, they’ll quickly tell you that in order to find your audience, you’ll need to identify the precise characteristics of your ideal customers, which will include things like their location, demographic, and even things like interests. Knowing this information will give you a much more complete understand of who you need to appeal to and why – if you know their basic personality traits, values and opinions in conjunction with their interests, the way you present products and services to them will not only be much more appealing to them, but will ensure a much more streamlined user experience. How is it that you find all this information, though? There are a few ways this can be achieved, but one of the most reliable ones is market research. Market research is one of the best ways you can acquire details about the group/s you’re targeting, information which can be later used to create audience personas. This step won’t mean you interview people on the street – market research can be quickly and easily conducted with online tools designed specifically to find all sorts of information.
Constructing audience personas
Although you might have information related to your audience, it’s often difficult to know what to actually do with it. The best thing you can do at this stage is create a persona – this is effectively a representation if your ideal customer, and will take into consideration their wants and needs through the analysis of their demographics, motivations, interests, and behaviours. In constructing this profile, you’ll be able to tailor your content and search engine optimisation to better connect with each of these customer segments. Not only will your audience be quicker to respond, you’ll likely have saved a considerable amount of time and money just from implementing this basic exercise. A persona has to be very detailed in order to achieve this, and for this reason an audience persona description will incorporate elements such as their interests, pain points, priorities, goals, concerns and even their personality traits, as this is useful in understanding what kinds of language you need to use in order to attract them.
Don’t undervalue details related to your audience
Although a lot of the technical stuff might seem more valuable on the surface, understanding what your audience wants and needs should never be understated – being able to give them exactly what they want is key to not only keeping them happy, but ensuring they come back for more!
