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To increase conversion for your company, you must pinpoint your marketing and sales funnel leaks so you know what to repair.
Do you know precisely where customers are dropping out of your funnel? Where you should focus marketing efforts most efficiently to attract customers to conversion? The best next steps to make the biggest gains fast?
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The goal is to thoroughly understand customer thought processes at each point in the marketing funnel where they have to make a decision to continue moving through it. By understanding what prospects are thinking at each stage of the buying process, you will be able to better match their motivation and move them through the sales funnel faster.
The Data Pattern Analysis tool includes the following:
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Supporting resources
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As a web designer, you’re constantly being bombarded with messages that tell you to acquire new skills, try new tools, and keep on hustling.
But if you’re constantly changing things up, does it do the opposite of what you originally set out to do? In other words, if you always have to start over, is it possible to ever really achieve anything?
I think it ultimately depends on why you’re making the change.
When Change Is the Right Move for Web Designers
One of the reasons I despise New Year’s resolutions is because it’s change for the sake of change:
It’s a new year, so it’s time to get all hyped up about this one thing I need to change about myself!
There’s a reason why so many resolutions fail by February. When you force a change, it’s really hard to stay invested in it, especially if it’s something you’ve chosen to do because everyone else has.
Change should be driven by necessity.
That said, when it comes time to make changes as a web designer, is it ever really necessary? Or are you learning new skills, trying new tools, or switching up your client list simply because it’s what you believe you have to do?
It’s important to be open to change, but you should only invest your time, money, or effort when it’s the absolute right move for you. Here are some ways you’ll know when that’s the case:
Learn New Skills To…
…Round Out the Basics
If you’re a new designer and there are gaps in your education and training (and I don’t mean formally, just in general), then there’s no reason to hesitate in spending time to acquire those skills.
…Add Evergreen Skills to Future-Proof Your Position
As you move up in your career, you’ll eventually find other skills worth learning. Just make sure they’ll help you move the needle.
The best way to do that is to focus on acquiring evergreen skills that’ll always be useful to you, no matter what stage you’re at in your career or how the design landscape changes. They should also go beyond the average skill set of a designer, so they help you stand out further from the pack.
… Create a Better Situation for Yourself
The web is constantly evolving, which means that your responsibilities and skills as a web designer will have to change in order to adapt. Whenever one of these shake-ups occurs, you should either be ready to master the needed skill right away or, better yet, have been working on it beforehand.
Take, Google’s mobile-first indexing, for instance. It announced it was going to be making this shift years before website rankings were impacted. Designers had plenty of time to not only learn what was needed to design for the mobile-first web, but to get all their existing clients’ sites in shape for it.
Adopt New Tools When…
…Your Existing Ones Are Slowing You Down
If you’re doing a lot of things from-scratch (like writing emails to clients or creating contracts), that’s a good sign your toolbox needs some improvement.
As a web designer, you should be focused on creating, not on the tedious details involved in running a business or communicating with clients. That’s just not a good use of your time. A lot of this stuff can easily be automated with tools and templates.
…You’re Turning Down Business
In some cases, it’s the right thing to say “no” to prospective clients — like when they’re a bad fit or can’t afford your rates. However, there are other times when you desperately want to be able to say “yes”, but you don’t have the capacity for the job or you’re unable to cover the full scope of what they need.
This is where new tools come in handy. For instance, let’s say you’ve been approached by a ecommerce company that not only wants you to build a new store, but also needs it fully optimized for search (it’s not the first time this has happened either). Rather than turn something like that down, you may find that the addition of an SEO tool to your toolbox is all you need to be able to say “yes”.
…You Have Extra Room in Your Budget
Obviously, you don’t want to throw away money on a bunch of tools simply because a ton of people are talking about them. But you’ll eventually get to a point where the tools that served you well in the first year of business need to be replaced.
If you get to a point where you have extra time to experiment and there’s room in your budget for upgraded tools, go ahead and assess what you currently have and test out replacement solutions that will help you work better, faster, and smarter.
Look for New Business Opportunities If…
…You’re Not Doing Well
“Well” here is subjective. For instance:
If you’re not doing well financially, you probably need to look for more clients;
If you’re not doing well in terms of how you get along with clients, you should explore a niche that’s a better fit;
If you’re not happy with your job because burnout and stress have overtaken your life, then you might consider exploring other avenues of work.
When something has been amiss for awhile, the last thing you should do is lean into it and hope it gets better.
…The Web is Changing
Notice a trend here? Each of these changes (skills, tools, and now business opportunities) is often driven by the fact that the web is always changing. And as the web changes, you have to be ready to evolve.
In terms of business opportunities, what you’ll realistically need to do is look for new kinds of design work as technologies make your job obsolete. Take website builders like Wix or Shopify, for example. As business owners and entrepreneurs take it upon themselves to build their own websites, more and more web designers will need to find other kinds of clients and jobs to take on.
…You Want to Diversify Your Income
This is something many web designers are doing already as they’ve discovered how beneficial it is to have predictable recurring revenue streams.
But even if you’ve already found one way to diversify and stabilize your income (like by offering website maintenance services), you may become interested in exploring other opportunities along the way. If you have the capacity to pursue them, then go for it.
Is Change a Good Idea?
As you can see, change can be a very good thing for a web designer, their business, and their clients. However, there should be a very good reason for the change and you need to prepare yourself for how it’s going to impact what you’re doing now before implementing it. No amount of change can happen without some level of sacrifice.
After six months of uncertainty 2020 is finally beginning to find a style of its own. There are nods to Brutalism, a delightful blending of 80s pastels with 90s primaries, and the font style of choice is anything but geometric sans-serif.
In this month’s collection of the freshest sites from the past four weeks you’ll find tons of new portfolios, from big agencies to freelancers, and some amazing primal scream therapy. Enjoy!
Looks Like You Need Iceland
Looks Like You Need Iceland is an incredible site that asks you to record a scream, that they’ll broadcast for you into the wide open spaces of Iceland as therapy. And then perhaps you’ll visit Iceland for real. It’s brilliant marketing for the Iceland tourist board.
Riverlane
The abstract 3D animation on Riverlane’s site is a stunning introduction to a topic that’s hard to visualize. The rest of the site is equally well done, with great typography, slick brand assets, and a professional engaging tone.
Monokai
Wimer Hazenberg’s site features a simple pixelated text column. But scroll down the page and keep an eye on the awesome text dissolve effect, it transforms this simple design.
I Weigh Community
The I Weigh Community is a non-profit community activism initiative helmed by Jameela Jamil. It’s devoted to radical inclusivity, and it promotes its message on its site with striking graphics and bold, expressive typography.
WAKA WAKA
Waka Waka is a design studio specializing in wooden furniture. The noise effect and the mid-century typography evoke the radical design of 60 years ago. The random rotations on the thumbnail hovers are delightfully disruptive.
Dataveyes
Dataveyes is an information design studio that works with large datasets to give meaning to complex information. Its site features beautiful, full-screen animations that illustrate the type of information it specializes in.
Year & Day
Year & Day is an ecommerce site that sells ceramics, glassware, and other choice pieces of tableware. It’s a colorful collection that perfectly complements your food and the stunning site takes its cues from the collection.
Dunderville
Dunderville is a motion design studio with an impressive portfolio of animation and live action films. Its site features a tactile paper fold detail, and as you would expect, some superb text, and vector animations.
André Venâncio
It’s been months since we last saw a creative developer’s site with a liquid effect. André Venâncio revisits the idea with a cool oil bubble effect, hover over the thumbnails to see it.
Thomas Prior
It’s not all 60s revivalism, pastels, and cute animations. There will always be room for minimalism, and nothing suits this style as well as portfolios for photographers; Thomas Prior’s site is a prime example.
Serra
Serra’s site features a really beautiful high-contrast typeface that sits apart from the usual sans-serif. The product page is all colored product photography. It exudes luxury and distinction in a saturated marketplace.
VYBES
VYBES is a CBD drink made in LA. Its site evokes the Californian spirit with baby pink brand colors and sun-bleached photography. It’s a cool, and ever so slightly Brutalist look for what is essentially a health drink.
Karina Sirqueira
We love the simplicity of Karina Sirqueira’s portfolio. The desaturated rainbow leads to a simple slideshow of projects, and it’s refreshing to see a minimal site that uses bold serif-based typography. The content feels fresh and honest too.
Smalls
Smalls produces healthy food for cats. The site, is packed with adorable pictures of kitties, which if you’re a cat person, is guaranteed to draw you in. There’s a definite Brutalist style to the site, and lots of color too.
Wildist
There’s a clear aesthetic beginning to emerge in 2020, with pastels creating a soft background for desaturated primaries, and Wildist gets it exactly right with this youthful, site that features just enough animation to bring it to life.
Kristen Kwong
We’ve seen a lot of OS-style sites recently, but Kristen Kwong’s is one of the slickest. It manages to take a simple metaphor for interaction and transform it with a vintage color scheme.
Stojo
Continuing the Miami-meets-Brutalism trend this month is the site for Stojo, a collapsable cup and bottle. The pastel shades block out a disrupted grid, but for our money it works better on mobile. The vintage typeface is a nice touch.
Hoang Nguyen
Hoang Nguyen’s site features a surreal 3D scene with mountains, a spinning planet, floating islands, a waterfall, and a floating dragon-boy. Click around the site and the scene transforms.
SMTH / Sam Smith
Sam Smith’s portfolio has a cool magazine style to it, with a nice blocky background on the text and a personality packed animated avatar taking centre stage.
Then I Met You
Then I met You is a site promoting a range of skincare products. In this case, the usual pastel colors are replaced with an 80s-style gradient. Watch the products as you scroll, the lighting changes creating an awesome, subtle 3D effect.
And when you understand your audience better you can target them in a smarter way, and get more bang for your buck from your paid campaigns on Facebook and Google.
Both Facebook and Google refer to these user interactions as Events. They allow you to track them using a tracking code installed on your website.
What Are Events
Events are user interactions that don’t involve loading another page on your website.
In ecommerce, the prime example of an event is Add to Cart.
Another event can be filling out a field in a form. As opposed to form completion that usually triggers a Thank You page, filling out one or more fields without submission – referred to as ‘form abandonment’ – can be recorded as an event.
More examples of events are: watching a video, clicking on mailto email address link, downloading media (such as PDFs).
If a visitor watched a video on your website, it demonstrates an interest in your offering.
Basically, any user interaction on your website can contribute to better understanding the user level of engagement with your brand, and the intent on moving down the funnel.
In ecommerce, even if a visitor did not complete a purchase, the abandoned cart shows a high purchase intent. Something has prevented the visitor from completing the purchase, but such a visitor is definitely worth your attention.
By tracking events you’ll be able to make a more focused offer to this user in your paid campaigns.
How? By injecting the events tracking data into your paid campaigns and using this data for more precise targeting and optimized offering.
Think about it – if you can group together all the visitors who watched a certain video and set up a customized campaign for them that reference what they saw in the video, wouldn’t that make for a far more effective campaign than a generic awareness message?
It sure will.
So that’s exactly what we’ll go through in this article: how to use event tracking to get more out of your ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.
How to Set Up Events on Your Website
With both Facebook and Google, you’ll need to use code for setting up events on your website.
Yes, unfortunate but true.
Setting up events isn’t the most complex coding task, but since you are dealing with your website code any mistake can cause havoc. So this task needs to be handled by your development team.
Events Set Up Using Facebook Pixel
Standard events on Facebook include:
View content
Search
Add to cart
Add to wishlist
Initiate checkout
Add payment info
Make purchase
Lead
Complete registration
First you need to verify that you already have the Facebook Pixel code embedded in the header code of every page of your website, between the <head> and <head> tags. If you don’t, first go ahead and insert the base Pixel code.
Next, select the event that you wish to track for a specific page from Facebook’s list of events. Let’s say Add to Cart event, which looks like this: fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’);
Paste the Add to Cart event code above the </script> tag.
Here’s how it should look:
Source: Facebook
Your header code
Your base Facebook Pixel code (the ID number is unique to every website)
The specific event code
You’ll need to repeat this on every page you want to track an event or a few events, for each page inserting the relevant event code.
For event tracking in Google Analytics you’ll need to create custom code snippets for every event.
The code is then added to the link code of the item or action you want to track so when the item is clicked it will be displayed as an event in Google Analytics.
The event code is made of four elements – two required elements and two optional elements:
Category (required) – defines a group of actions you want to track
Action (required) – the type of action you want to track
Label (optional) – for your monitoring convenience, stating what’s the event is about
Value (optional) – assigning a numeric value to the event; can be monetary value, or just a scale
The basic structure of an event code looks like this:
All this event data needs to be injected into your paid campaigns in order to optimize them but before we get into that, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.
Code.
Dealing with code isn’t ideal for marketers. It’s just not our forte.
It holds us back since constant optimization is one of the core principles of online marketing.
And when you need your development team for every act of optimization, well, it’s not ideal.
So is there a better way to track events on your website? Apparently there is.
There’s a tool called Oribi that offers exactly that – no code event tracking.
Oribi tracks every interaction on your website, page views and button clicks, automatically. It collects all this data and makes it all available to you. Even when you make changes to your website, like adding a page or changing buttons, events are updated dynamically. As said, all of this is done without any code business on your behalf.
Here’s how event tracking looks in Oribi:
The value here is apparent. You don’t need to decide which events to track, and you don’t need your development team to track it for you. Everything is tracked for you. You just need to follow the data.
Using Event Data to Optimize Your Paid Campaigns
Now let’s see how to use all this event data, that you collected so diligently, to better segment and optimize your paid campaigns, and get more return on your ad spend.
There are two main objectives for tracking event data:
Internal – being able to analyze how visitors are interacting with your website and from that optimizing the UX (user experience) on your website
External – exporting the data to your paid campaigns to better segment them – group together audiences according to their place in the funnel and specific interests in order to deliver more relevant messages
Let’s look again at the Add to Cart event. As mentioned, adding an item to a cart shows a high purchase intent. These visitors, even if didn’t complete the purchase, declared their interest in your product.
They are ‘worth your efforts’ to continue and court them in the hope they will complete a purchase in the future.
But they are all different, and you can understand that based on the item, or items, they chose.
If you could, for example, group together all those visitors who added a shirt and then group together those who added a pair of shoes – wouldn’t your paid campaigns for these two distinct groups be so much more valuable?
Not to mention you could segment them to men and women.
You’ll be able to deliver a highly relevant message, or offering, in your ads.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as segmentation and optimization of your paid campaigns that can be achieved with event tracking.
Two Main Use Cases for Ad Campaign Optimization Based on Event Tracking
Both Facebook and Google offer very strong optimization capabilities for their ad campaigns.
There are two objectives for this:
Ability to segment your audience in order to deliver a highly relevant message (the more segmented the audience is, the more relevant your message can be)
Ability to reach new audiences that are also relevant to your offering
Let’s look at how these objectives are achieved through specific features in Facebook and Google ad campaigns.
Facebook’s Retargeting and Google’s Remarketing
The simplest way to explain the Retargeting / Remarketing feature is this:
When you visit a website a tracking cookie is installed on your browser – yes, that’s the famous cookies message you now see everywhere. After you leave the website you begin to see display ads of that website. This must be familiar to basically anyone.
This is the retargeting / remarketing feature. To show you ads of the website you visited on other websites.
The ads can be general, just a reminder of the brand. But they can be more than that. What if they related directly to the content you read on that website? Would that make a bigger impact? Of course it would.
Let’s say you browsed a vacation apartments website. You looked at apartments in Lisbon, but didn’t make a reservation. A couple of days later, while scrolling down your Facebook feed, you all of a sudden see an ad that says “Still thinking about Lisbon?”
Now that’s powerful. It will stop your scrolling. It will make you think about Lisbon again. If you clicked the ad, it would take you back straight to the Lisbon section of that vacation apartments website.
So by tracking events – in this case browsing a specific page – you are able to deliver highly targeted, super relevant, and hopefully mighty engaging ads to audience that already demonstrated interest in your offering.
Facebook’s Lookalike Audience and Google’s Similar Audience
The simplest way to explain the Lookalike / Similar Audience feature is this:
Based on your audience attributes, Facebook and Google are able to target similar people and show them your ads.
Behind this simple explanation there is a highly complex algorithm able to locate people with similar interests, demographic, location and professional background.
Facebook and Google are able to do this thanks to the vast amounts of data they have on their users.
Let’s say you track a video as an event. The video is a top-of-the-funnel content that explains the benefits of using the app you are offering. Website visitors who watched the video are ‘recorded’.
You can define the visitors who watched the video as a specific ‘audience’ in Facebook or Google Analytics.
Then, what the algorithm does is find similarities between the visitors who watched the video and based on these similarities it can show your ads to other people – people who never watched the video – but share the same similarities with your audience.
This is an incredible tool to expand your potential audience and reach people that are likely to be interested in your offering. In marketing jargon, we are talking about high-quality leads in order to get more value on your ad spend.
Connecting the Dots – Events, Audience, and Targeting
So, you might be thinking, this all sounds great. I’m very impressed with both Facebook and Google and how they can help me refine and optimize my ad campaigns – but how do I make all this happen?
You’re right to be asking. Making this ad magic happen requires a lot of setup, tying together the various elements we discussed here – events, audiences and targeting.
Let’s see how it’s done.
The first part of the chain are the events. We’ve already covered how to set them up, both on Facebook and Google Analytics.
Remember – how you define an event is crucial for the success of the campaign, either retargeting / remarketing or lookalike / similar audience, you’ll run based on this event.
Once you have the events set up, it’s time to connect them to your ad campaign. In this context, ‘connect’ means enabling Facebook / Google to use the data collected from the event tracking to optimize the ad campaign.
In Facebook
Let’s start with the easier of the two.
Once you inserted the event tracking code to the various pages of your website, the events data is available for you on your Ads Manager.
As opposed to Google where you need to first import the event data from Google Analytics to Google Ads (we’ll get to how to do it in a sec) in Facebook this import action is taken care for you.
Still, you’ll need to locate this data. Here’s how:
Log in to Ads Manager and click the Pixels tab
On the left, choose Data sources, it will take you to your pixel
Now you’ll see a general breakdown of your events
Events received is the total number of events recorded by the pixel
Top events lists the highest performing events
Activity shows number of events recorded per day for the past week
Click on the Details button
Here you can see the actual breakdown of events, by volume and date. You can segment the visitors based on their actions, as we discussed before, or use the different segmentation for Lookalike audience creation.
Since you are already in Facebook Ads Manager, all the information is available for campaign targeting and optimization.
In Google
It’s a two-step process. First you need to define the events in Google Analytics, and then import them into Google Ads.
Define the event in Google Analytics
In your Analytics account, click the Admin tab in the bottom left corner
Next, click the Goals tab
Select “+New Goal”
Choose the “Custom” option
Name your goal
Select “Event” option
Now you’ll need to refer to the four elements you defined in the event code you had inserted for the specific event. This: onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”
The Goal you’re creating will have a specific box for each value. It looks like this:
The text you are entering here must be identical to the text in the code. If it won’t, the event won’t be recorded.
You’ll need to repeat the process above with every event you’re tracking.
Import the event into Google Ads
In your Google Ads account, click the Tools tab at the top navigation bar
Select “Conversions” from the dropdown menu
On the left side of the page, click “Google Analytics”
You’ll see a list of all the goals you defined in Analytics
Select the ones you want to import
Click “Import”
And… you’re done.
Yes, the events you track on your website are finally ‘available’ for segmenting your remarketing campaigns and creating similar audiences.
It was a long way to get here, but it is sure worth it.
One more thing though.
Remember way, way back at the beginning of the article when I mentioned Oribi, that tracks all the events on your website automatically without you needing to touch any code?
Well, they also import all these events, to both Facebook Ads Manager and Google Ads, in the same automated, no code way.
Conclusion
Event tracking provides you with valuable data on your website visitors, such as level of intent, specific interests and place in funnel.
Such valuable data must be collected, since it helps you better understand your audience.
We could have stopped here, as the above present enough value on its own. But there’s more.
This valuable data can also utilized for the optimization of your paid ad campaigns on Facebook and Google.
You can, and should, use event data to deliver highly relevant and effective retargeting / remarketing ads to segmented audiences who have already visited your website.
You should also use event data as the base for creating lookalike / similar audiences for ad campaigns targeting potential audiences who have not yet visited your website.
By optimizing your paid ad campaigns with event data you’ll be able to better engage users, increase your conversion rate and get more of your ad spend, meaning, you’ll pay less for more clicks.
With all this reasoning, there can be only one conclusion, right?
When I first started out in marketing, I thought traffic was everything.
I wanted to be as big as companies like HubSpot. Just look at the image above and you’ll see how many visitors they are getting.
They generate 29.61 million visitors a month from 11.74 million people. And those visitors produce roughly 10 billion dollars of market cap.
Now, let’s look at NeilPatel.com. Can you guess how many visitors I’m getting each month?
I’m generating roughly 8.717 million visitors a month from 3.616 million people.
When you look at it from a unique visitor perspective, HubSpot is getting 3.24 times more unique visitors than me.
So, in theory, I should be worth roughly 3 times less than them, right? Well, technically I’m not even worth 1/10th of them. Not even close.
Why is that? It’s because I didn’t go after the right target audience, while HubSpot did.
And today, I want you to avoid making this massive mistake that I made. Because marketing is tough, so why would you start off by going after the wrong people?
It will just cause you to waste years and tons of money like it did with me.
Defining your target audience is the first and most essential step towards success for any company or business, especially if you are just getting started.
So before we dive into things, let me first break down what you are about to learn in this article:
What is a Target Audience?
The Difference Between Target Audience and Persona
The Importance of Selecting Your Target Audience Correctly
How to Define your Target Audience: 6 Questions to Help You
Creating Customized Content for Your Audience
Let’s get started!
What is a target audience?
A target audience is a share of consumers that companies or businesses direct their marketing actions to drive awareness of their products or services.
I know that is a tongue twister, so let me simplify it a bit more…
The intention here is to target a market with whom you will communicate with. A group of people with the same level of education, goals, interests, problems, etc. that will need the product or service you are selling.
Basically, you want to target people who will buy your stuff.
If you target people who don’t want to buy your stuff, you might get more traffic to your site… but it won’t do much for you. And you’ll be pulling out your hair trying to figure out why none of your visitors are buying from you.
Now before we dive into the details on finding your target audience, let’s first go over “personas” because many people confuse them with a target audience and if you do, you’ll just end up wasting time.
The difference between a target audience and a persona
You already know the definition, so I won’t bore you with that again.
The most commonly used data to define the target audience of a company are:
Age
Gender
Education background
Purchasing power
Social class
Location
Consumption habits
Examples of a target audience: Women, 20-30 years old, living in Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree, monthly income of $4,000 – $6,000, and passionate about fashion and decor.
If you start a company without knowing your exact target audience, you could end up like me instead of HubSpot… we wouldn’t want that now.
And here is another example. Let’s say you have a business that sells educational toys. So your target audience might be children, mothers, education specialists, or teachers.
Or you have a motorcycle business. Your audience will definitely not be people younger than 18, right?
There is no point in trying to reach everyone in order to increase your chances of sales and profit. It will actually cost you more and decrease your profit margins in the long run.
Now let’s go over “personas”…
Persona
In marketing, personas are profiles of buyers that would be your ideal customers.
Personas are fictional characters with characteristics of your real customers. They’re developed based on target audience research and may help you direct your marketing actions better.
A persona is a person that may be interested in what you have to offer since they’re very connected to your brand and you must make an effort to make them a client and retain them.
A persona involves much deeper and more detailed research than the target audience since it includes:
Personal characteristics
Purchasing power
Lifestyle
Interests
Engagement in social networks
Professional information
Persona example: Mariana, 22, blogger. Lives in Miami, Florida. Has a journalism degree. Has a blog and posts makeup tutorials and tips about fashion and decor. She always follows fashion events in the area and participates in meetings with other people in the fashion niche. As a digital influencer, she cares a lot about what people see on her social network profiles. Likes to practice indoor activities and go to the gym in her free time.
If I had to define the main difference between persona and target audience, I’d say that the target audience considers the whole, in a more general way, while the persona has a more specific form.
And if you want help creating personas for business, check out this article about creating the perfect persona. But for now, let’s focus on finding your right target audience.
The importance of choosing your target audience correctly
The big mistake I made was that I didn’t figure out my target audience when I first started. I just created content and started marketing to anyone who wanted traffic.
But that is a bit too vague because not everyone wants more traffic is a good fit for my ad agency.
They could just want to be famous on Instagram or YouTube, which is a lot of people, but that doesn’t help me generate more income.
Funny enough, there are more people who are interested in getting Instagram followers than people who want to learn about SEO.
But once you know your target audience, it’s easier to find and perform keyword research. For example, I know that I shouldn’t waste too much time writing articles about Instagram or Twitch even though the search volume is high.
It will just cause me to get irrelevant traffic and waste my time/money.
And that’s the key… especially when it comes to things like SEO or paid ads. The moment you know your target audience, you can perform keyword research correctly and find opportunities that don’t just drive traffic, but more importantly, drive revenue.
Now let’s figure out your target audience.
How to define your target audience: 6 questions to help you
Figuring out your target audience isn’t rocket science. It just comes down to a few simple questions.
6 actually, to be exact.
Go through each of the questions below and you’ll know the exact audience you are targeting.
1. Who are they?
When thinking about who might be your target audience, you must consider who are the people who identify with your brand.
One way to find out is to monitor who follows, likes, shares, and comments on your posts on social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.
If someone is willing to engage with you, then chances are they are your target.
But in many cases, your ideal audience may not always be on the social web. They might be inactive on social media but buy from your company frequently or sign up for your services.
Even those who bought from you only once must be considered a part of your target audience, as someone who bought once might buy again.
There is no point in making a great effort to sell if you don’t make a similar effort to keep the customers you have already gained.
Customers like to feel special, and that is why the post-sales process is so important. Your relationship with the customer must remain even after the purchase is completed.
2. What are their greatest difficulties, problems, or desires?
What is cool, interesting, and good for you might not be for the customer.
You can’t think only of yourself when it’s time to define the difficulties, problems, and desires of your target audience. You must put yourself in their shoes.
Don’t make offers based on what you think. Make them according to research grounded in data, previous experiences, and analysis of your potential customers’ behavior.
Understand the greatest difficulties your audience faces to try to help solve them.
3. Where do they find the information they need daily?
Everyone needs information.
Every day you are surrounded by tons of information on the channels that you follow, but when you need it the most, where do you go to find that information?
Identify the communication channels most appropriate to your target audience and try to talk to them using a specific language from their universe.
For example, I know my target audience will either read marketing blogs or spend a lot of time on social sites like YouTube and LinkedIn consuming information.
4. What is the benefit of your product?
Everyone wants solutions for their problems and to make their lives easier. This is a collective desire and it’s no different for your target audience.
Think a little about your product and the problem of your target audience. What benefits does your product or service offer? What can it do to solve those problems? What is the main value offer?
With so much competition, you must try to find your competitive advantage in your niche and always try to improve your product, offering something extra that others do not.
5. What draws their attention negatively?
Being optimistic helps a lot, but thinking about the negatives can also help, especially when we talk about target audiences.
Better than considering what your audience wants, you can consider what it definitely doesn’t want, what it considers negative, and what it avoids.
With this powerful information in hand, you may have more chances to captivate your potential customers.
Avoiding what they consider negative is the first step to gain their approval. After that, you only need to apply other strategies to do efficient marketing.
6. Who do they trust?
Trust is everything to your target audience. No one purchases a product or service from a company they don’t know or trust.
This is why reviews on Amazon are read and so important for sellers. They know it builds trust… it’s also helped Amazon become a trillion-dollar company.
Even though this is the last question to define target audiences, it is one of the most important ones.
This is why the reputation of your company is so important. Taking care of the relationship with your customers is essential as they will spread information about your brand on the internet and to their friends and family.
If you get good reviews, have positive comments, and garner a great reputation, this will be the base for potential customers to feel motivated to buy from you.
Creating customized content for your audience
Now that you know your audience, let’s get to the fun stuff. Let’s create content for them.
Everyone creates content, right? Just look at Google if you don’t believe me.
You just have to put a keyword on Google and you will see thousands if not millions of results for each keyword.
When you research “best earbuds” on Google, this is what you see:
First, there are options of products from Google Shopping, with ads and prices for different earphones for various audiences, needs, and tastes.
Next, there is a list of sites and blogs with information about different types of earphones and comparisons:
There is no shortage of content about this subject or any other that you can search for. Anyone can create and publish text with no barriers.
The question is how you can make this content more personalized and attractive for your consumer.
The secret though is to create content that targets your ideal customer and no one else. Generic content may produce more traffic, but it will also produce fewer sales.
To find what your target audience is searching for, you can use Ubersuggest. Just type in a keyword related to your audience.
From there, on the left-hand navigation, click on “keyword ideas.” You’ll then be taken to a report that looks like the one below.
You now have topics to choose from. Not all of them will be a good fit but some will.
I recommend that you go after the long-tail terms, such as “best earbuds for running” (assuming your target audience is active). The more generic terms like “best earbuds” will drive traffic and a few sales, but it won’t convert as well as more specific terms.
The same goes if you are doing keyword research for the service industry or even the B2B space.
Types of content to create
Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, you might be confused as to what type of content you should be creating.
You’ll want to create content based on your funnel. In essence, you want to cover each step of the funnel.
The top of the funnel involves content created for visitors and leads, that is, people that might access your site, blog, or social networks by chance.
When thinking about the top of the funnel, the idea is to create materials with more general subjects, with clear and easily accessible language.
It could be educational content, including clarifications or curiosities about your product or service or something somehow related to your industry.
The middle of the funnel is when the conversions happen. In other words, in this stage, the person who has a problem and the intention to solve it considers the purchase of your product or service.
It’s the middle of the road, but it is not the sale itself, because it’s still only about ideas. It’s in the middle of the funnel that you get closer to your target audience and generate more identification.
Next: bottom of the funnel content. This content focuses more on your product or service.
Here you can introduce details about functions, benefits, and other direct information about your product or service.
It is far more likely to convert here as this particular audience has practically decided to buy already and you are only going to give them a final push.
Conclusion
I’m hoping this article saves you from making the big mistake I made.
But knowing your target audience isn’t enough, though. It doesn’t guarantee success. You still need to create and market your content. That’s why I covered keyword research in this article as well.
Once you create content, you may also want to check out these guides as they will help you attract the right people to your site:
As a web designer, you’re constantly being bombarded with messages that tell you to acquire new skills, try new tools, and keep on hustling.
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