Whether we are aware of it or not, our website content, service or product will probably be aimed at a particular market or audience. Understanding your audience and what makes them tick will enable you to design, build and market a far more successful website that achieves your goals.
This is basic marketing. Its important to remember that you can’t please everyone, and in fact, you will be far more successful if you focus on getting it right for a specific audience rather than just designing for anyone and everyone.
Defining your target Audience
It is probably quite unlikely that you have completely no idea who your target audience actually is, but it might be the case that you would benefit from actually clarifying and acknowledging this group.
There are different ways in which you can segment your market.
Demographic (age and gender)
Age / Life Cycle (different ages need different products at certain stages of life for example young families or newly retired people.
Geographical (can be country or even town)
Psychographic ( including such things as beliefs/faith, values, lifestyles)
By using these general segments as a guide you can start to build potential target audiences. For example Retired men living in big cities who are interested in healthy eating and keeping fit.
Designing for your audience
It may well be that you already have a fairly clear idea of who your target audience is. The rest of this post is intended to help yo to answer the following two questions.
1) What is important to your target audience?
2) How do you communicate with them effectively?
What is important to your target audience?
Here are four key areas that are important to consider.
Needs - What is it that your target audience simply can’t do without. Where is their itch? Addressing your audiences needs on your site is a must.
Urgency - It is important to consider the urgency of your audience/vistors. If you run a lock smiths website and someone has locked themselves out of their house they will urgently want your phone number, your interesting and informative blog and animated homepage fall into insignificance if your visitor can’t find that phone number straight away.
Values - This is the idea of aligning yourself with the values, culture and behaviour of your audience. What do your audience consider to be appropriate, cool or relevant.
Desires - What does your audience aspire to be? or maybe its a product they don’t need but would really like.
How do you communicate with your target audience effectively?
Lets look at four key areas of your site that we can consider to help us communicate to our target audiences.
Design
A good design is one that promotes your purpose, improves user experience and helps achieve your website goals. It delivers your content and should enhance your authority and support your brand. Any element of your design that doesn’t serve one of these purposes probably shouldn't be there. Strip out non essential elements that detract from the main purpose of the site. Unnecessary animations or ‘gimmicks’ that don’t improve user experience are just annoying even if they appear ‘cool’.
Content
The phrase “Content is King” probably gets thrown around far too often, but it is true. In most cases, everything about your website should be based around high quality, unique and relevant content.
Language
Pitching the language and ‘tone of voice’ is really important if you want to identify and engage with your target audience. Your language and ‘tone of voice’ is so closely linked in with your brand - It is also important to be genuine and the language you use should be closely entwined with your brand. It might be useful to refer back to how you segmented your audience to make sure you have the right tone and style of language for your target audience. Remember though - it is important that you are consistent across all your content.
Platform
The final consideration we have is platform. With such an increase in people searching the web using smart phones and tablets it would be daft not to seriously consider a responsive site. A responsive site, very basically changes it’s layout to ‘fit’ the screen size the site is being displayed on. This means that you avoid having to scroll horizontally or zoom in to read content on smart phones and tablets. I would argue that you should have a good reason not to have a responsive site rather than the other way around. There maybe specific times (maybe if you have a web app or a specialist site) that a responsive site is not necessary or even appropriate, but for most sites, it makes sense to make sure your content is as accessible via all platforms and that your users are able to engage with it, no matter what device they are using.
