Laying the Foundation: Evaluate Your Target Audience & Content

Before you dive into the website content strategies in this course, it is a valuable exercise to take stock of where your site currently stands. The two most important elements to review are:

• Your target audience
• Your existing content Later in this course, you’ll explore different web content strategies to attract more visitors, but if your content doesn't resonate with your target audience or current customer base, your hard work will not produce the desired results. Also keep in mind that as you start to adopt some of these web content strategies, you will need to work with your existing content.

Understand Your Target Audience

The key to powerful content is understanding your audience. What do they like, what do they need, and what do they expect when they visit your site? It is always a good idea to periodically reexamine current followers, customers, and potential customers to get an understanding of your actual audience versus your anticipated audience, or your audience from one, two, or five years ago.

For example, you may have expected your product or service to appeal to a younger age group, but the majority of your follows, inquiries, or sales now come from an older crowd. If there has been a shift, you will need to adapt your content to appeal to your evolving audience.

Take this time to analyze your audience, focusing on the following areas:

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Purchasing Behavior

Demographics

Demographics include unemotional, fact-based information about your audience, including:

• Age
• Geographic location
• Education level
• Marital status
• Occupation You can find some of this information through Google Analytics. You can also ask your audience for it directly. For example, if they sign up for a free eBook, in addition to their email address, ask them to provide one or two pieces of demographic information.

Psychographics

Psychographics explore the emotional and personal information about your audience, including:

• Needs and desires
• Values
• Hobbies
• Goals
• Pain points (areas where they're struggling) Psychographics are sometimes harder to pin down. To understand psychographics, you need to interact with and observe your audience. Read their comments on your social sites, add polls to your blog posts, and listen to their feedback.

Purchasing Behavior

Take time to understand how your market interacts with your product, service, or the topics relevant to your offers. Consider analyzing the competition if you don’t have enough of your own data. Ask yourself:

• What kind of information are they looking for?

• What do they already know? What is their level of expertise?

• What types of questions do they ask when engaging with products, services, or relevant topics? Here are some ways to learn more about your audience's behavior:

• Observe how they interact with your product, service, or relevant topics

• Follow their activity on relevant forums

• Keep track of social media posts (yours and the competition's) that generate the most interest and interaction

• Speak with your audience directly Once you have collected this information, you will use it to create content that appeals to your audience overall. So even if there is some variance within your audience, focus on the characteristics they share. For example, even if they are from different age groups and geographic locations, they may share a more specific interest you can focus on.

In some pieces of content, you would focus on general topics that would appeal to your entire audience. In others, you would segment and focus on sub-topics. Understand your audience and don't be afraid to ask them what they want. Web content can incorporate all the marketing bells and whistles, but if it doesn't address your target's needs, it will not make an impact.

Conduct a Website Content Review

Now that you have gained a better understanding of the people you are creating content for, it is time to evaluate your existing content. You will first need to create a list of all the pages on your site.

How to Locate All of Your Website Pages

Manually creating a list of your website pages is inefficient and time-consuming. If you include blog posts, the page count can get up into the hundreds. You have a few options that will allow you to generate a complete list of pages quickly:

• If you are unable to access your sitemap, use a free, online sitemap generator. Simply enter 'free sitemap generator' in a search engine and you'll find a number of options, such as XML-Sitemaps
• If your website was created in WordPress, or a similar website builder, you can access your sitemap in the backend or use a plug-in such as Google XML Sitemaps to export all URLs
• Log in to your Google Analytics page and navigate to the site content section