Your guide to digital audience research: 3 simple steps

As any good digital marketing consultant will tell you, the key to business success lies in defining and engaging with the right audience.

Do you know the audience you’re targeting? It might sound like an obvious question, but with the day-to-day running of the business typically taking over, it’s easy to look past this vital task.

You may even have carried out a fair degree of audience research when you first started the business, but is it still relevant?

We think there’s three easy steps any business owner can undertake to identify their audience and engage them effectively. And, because you have a website, you have the perfect tool to get started!

Step 1: Identify your audience with website research

You undoubtedly have a target audience in mind, but if your business is already up and running, the question is whether or not its website is attracting the right people.

Website analytics contain a goldmine of information when it comes to audience research.

There’s a few simple things you can look at to get started:

Who’s visiting? Use Google Analytics’ demographics feature to see the age and gender of people who are visiting your site. For instance, if it’s currently attracting mainly men aged fifty and over, yet your products are aimed towards women in the millennial generation, something’s wrong!
How do they reach the site? There’s a couple of things to look at here. Firstly, where are visitors coming from, geographically? If you only service the UK, but most visitors are from overseas, you have some work to do. Secondly, how do they reach you? Look at referral sources to find out which channels they’ve used to find your website.
What devices are they using? These days, most will visit via a mobile device, but understanding a little more about the devices your audience are using will help you format content for them. Who knows - you may even find that the vast majority visit from desktop computers.

Following your research, if you find you’re already attracting the right audience, it’s not quite time to dig out the champagne. Instead, consider what it is you might be doing right, and plan to do more of it.

Equally, if you’re not attracting the right audience, what are you getting wrong?

Is it the content, imagery or page design? Speak to an experienced digital marketing company to delve in deeper.

Step 2: Find out how the audience engages with your website

Now you’ve defined the audience, take a look at how they engage with your website.

By looking at which pages and blog posts are the most popular (check out the page visits and average session duration for clues), you’ll get a feel for the type of content you need to focus on.

Investigate what content is being shared, too. Search for mentions of your business online, and take another look at those sources of referrals to see how many people are landing on your site from services such as Twitter and Facebook.

The more you know about this stuff, the more you can focus your digital marketing efforts going forward.

Step 3: Develop brilliant, engaging content

This is where you take your learnings from steps 1 and 2 above and put them into action.

Whenever you write a new blog post or copy for a product web page, keep that audience in mind. Think about the type of content you know from your analytics research makes them stop, click and share.

Regurgitating old content is a great idea, too. You can repurpose old blog posts or turn them into video pieces. Get creative and don’t be afraid to be a nuisance on social media by continually reposting your hard work.

Ready to find your target audience? Go get ‘em! And, if you need help, the super knowledgable team at New Edge are here to help!