Identify Your Audience
Now that you have your website built, it’s time start thinking about content right?
Not so fast! Slow down. First you need to determine who your website will be targeted toward in order to attract potential customers (or visitors). This visitor profile should include ethnicity, age range, income level, occupation, religion, gender location and possibly level of education, internet surfing habits special interests and buying habits.
Brand Build Sell, is targeted towards people who want to to learn more about how to make a website and who are new the web (or just not tech savvy). Because of this, my writing style is casual and the website is organized in a way where new visitors can easily follow a step-by-step process of creating a website.
Why Does Audience Matter?
When you’re passionate and knowledgeable about a topic, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you have thought about it or not, you have always written to an audience. Every email, sticky note, correspondence, or even a resume is written to a specific person.
Sometimes you will write professional and well thought emails to co-workers, where as an email to a friend or family member will be more conversational and casual. Keeping your audience in mind while you write will help you make decisions about what information to include, how to organize your ideas and how to best respond to visitor feedback.
How Do I identify My Audience?
Take some time to consider who you audience is and what they want from you. Try answering the following questions:
- What is your targeted age group, income level, occupation, religion, gender or location?
- What’s their level of education? Are they computer or tech savvy?
- What are they interested in buying? What information do they need?
- What is most important to them?
- What are they least likely to care about?
Establish a list of specific objectives for your website
- What do you want to accomplish?
- Sell a product?
- Gathering contact information for emailing?
- Sign up a new member?
- Encourage them o visit a new place or try out an awesome service?
- Take a survey or submit feedback on a product or service?
Once you decide what actions a visitor will make on your website, you can design your site to be organized around that goal.
Do you have several unrelated audiences?
Then you should consider creating more than one website. If you are promoting multiple products or services that are closely related, having one website should be enough, but if they are completely unrelated and you find it hard to tie them together (in a way that makes sense), creating different sites may be the best way to achieve your goals.
I made my list, but I’m still unsure about who I’m talking to.
Sure I understand, the entire process of creating a website can be overwhelming. So here is a general list of tips to follow while writing and trying to gain traffic for your site.
- Speak using easy to understand language. Explain concepts, ideas or selling points to your readers in terms that the average visitor would understand.
- Avoid using industry jargon when trying to gain a better understanding of your visitor.
- Keep your text easy to read. Use short sentences, since longer sentence tend to be harder to follow. An informal conversational style of writing is easier to read than a scholarly explanation.
- Keep your navigation logical and any order processes simple.
- Offer help or FAQ pages, just in case a visitor has a problem or question that can be answered quickly.
The better you understand your customers, the easiest it becomes to meet their needs. Now lets start creating your content.
