In order to identify your audience your target audience think of what you would do if you sat down to make a sketch of a person. You would add one element of the face at a time—eyes, nose, hair, then refine those elements even more by adding the color of the eyes, the style of hair. Eventually you would have an entire face before your eyes and you would have identified a specific person. In order to identify your web readers, don’t attempt to get a complete picture all at once. Start with a piece of paper or your word processing screen in front of you, and ask yourself specific questions which you can definitively answer. After you have a basic outline, do your homework and fill in the missing information.
You will first ask yourself questions which involve the overall demographics of your targeted audience. Solid, measurable data gives you a good foundation for understanding your audience. What age or gender group are you targeting? What social or economic group? Are your visitors members of a specific profession? Are you targeting a specific type of person who is looking for a specific product or service? (In almost all cases, the answer to that will be yes!) What is the primary language of your readers, and what is the average education level? Would your readers be likely to have disabilities which would affect how they view your site? All of these pieces of the puzzle can help define your audience, and, assuming you determined that the majority of those reading your content were young, self-employed and at least fifty percent Spanish speaking, would that alter the manner in which you wrote that content?
Qualitative Data
Who is that person and what tasks are they performing on the website you are writing for? Qualitative information tells you why people will visit the website and read your content, as well as what they want to read, what they need and what they expect. Analytics programs are a good place to get the qualitative information you need such as which pages receive the most traffic and which links are clicked the most. Such a program will also let you see how much time people spend on the site, and whether or not they hang around and interact. Once you know why people visit your site and understand if the majority of them leave satisfied with their experience, your writing will change to reflect that information.
It can be really easy to get caught up in the writing process and neglect the person you expect to actually read your content, yet if you write without identifying your audience you may end up getting fewer readers than you will if you have a good understanding of them. You must also avoid thinking that your fellow writers who leave comments regarding your content are in any way your target audience. If you operate under that assumption then your viewpoint—and your writing will be extremely limited. Stretch your thinking and look at the big picture, then craft your content in such a way that it will not only appeal to your target audience but to the largest portion of readers possible.
Tags: website content
