Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience for Your Blog

As a blogger, a website survey tool is your best friend. This is a way for you to communicate and build a relationship with your audience.  The more you get to know your audience, the more you know what type of content satisfies them.

Blogs are Made to be Read

Believing in yourself as a brand is great. However, sometimes this can make a blogger blind. He or she could focus too much on blogging about topics that he just feels like writing about without worrying about the relevance of his content to his readers. This is a selfish practice for bloggers. It may get you traction in the beginning, but you will eventually lose it over time. Maintaining relevance is key to a successful blog and, to do this, you must understand your content core.

The Content Core’s Relevance

The content core describes topics that are relevant to you and your audience. When you begin blogging, there is only “the middle.” Essentially, this entails: what you do, what you offer, and what problems you solve as a blogger. Surrounding this middle (but not yet part of your core) is your potential audience and what they care about.

While it is alright to just write about you and your interests at the beginning, this is not the only thing you should write about. This will keep your content core the same and not spell success for your blog. To expand this, you must find out what your target audience wants and relate it to you.

Understanding Your Audience

The most effective way to get to know your audience is to use a survey tool. Here are key points that you must remember when conducting a survey. 

1. The Goal

The goal of a survey is for you to get new information about your audience. You may think you know them, but do you know the specifics? For example, you may know that your blog attracts mothers, but you may not know that most of them are 20-30 years old. If this is so, then creating content that is for mothers 40 years old and above will not be appreciated by majority of your audience and chances are, you are going to lose them.

Moreover, when it comes to specifics, you can study what makes your audience excited, what the newest trends are, and why they are on your blog. These are the data that you can capitalize on to evolve your content.

 To know the specifics of your audience, ask questions that will make you aware of their interests, age, family, friends, preferences, hobbies, etc. When you know these details about your audience, you can revise your marketing and content strategy to cater to them. 

2. Know Where to Ask

There is a business concept known as “social listening.” This is basically the monitoring of social media to see how your blog is perceived. With the help of this, you can identify potential problems with your content that you can confirm in a survey. It also shows you which social media platform your blog is most active on and where the most engaged users are. Inviting people from this platform to go to your website and answer a survey will definitely garner results. You may also see trends in your audience’s interests and problems. 

3. Build Personas

In the business world, a persona represents your ideal customer. For a blog, this is a general view of what your ideal visitor’s demographics, motivations, interests, and behaviors are. When you gather information from your survey(s), chances are you will come up with more than one persona. This is normal. Identify all the personas with meticulous detail and see how they all relate to each other. 

4. Put Personas into Action

Always refer to these personas on a regular basis, especially when you are looking to make new content and/or changes to your website. Doing this can point you in the right direction.

 However, pleasing these personas does not mean you have to change yourself. Your target audience reads your blogs because the branding, that is you, appeals to them. As a blogger, when it is said that you must cater to your audience, it merely means that your message just has to connect with them more efficiently. This could mean any of the following:

• Using a more understandable language, mood, or tone.
• Placing visual aids and infographics.
• Set up an easy to use navigation for your website.
• Choosing relevant topics.

Key Takeaway

Following these tips will help expand your content core and it creates a domino effect. This happens because you have to evolve who you are and what you offer in order to relate and cater to your audience’s interest. In other words, by getting to know your audience, you expand the middle of your content core and this gets larger. However, when this happens, the middle does not stop being surrounded by the audience. Essentially, you gain new audiences. If you see where this is going, then you know that identifying your audience is a process that never stops. You must practice doing this all the time in order to have a successful blog.