5 Ways to Determine your Target Markets & Drive More Relevant Traffic
Blogging for a business can be challenging. It’s the longest, most time consuming form of advertising that has a price for every consumer that comes across it. It’s not digestible in 5 seconds, and the information gathered entirely depends on the quality of your writing. Does that information properly translate the main point of your blog to the consumer? Knowing who you’re writing to is the difference between effective marketing and wasted effort. Let’s explore getting to know who you are writing for so that you can better understand how to effectively structure your content.
1. Who Buys From You?
Look at who is currently consuming your ideas, services, or products. Why do they buy from you? Do they have similar interests or characteristics? If so, are there other potential customers like them? Do a quick analysis to determine who your most valued customers are. How can you best provide them with valuable information using written blog posts? What do they want to know about?
2. How are your competitors writing?
Look at your competition. This is getting easier to do with social media. Look at who they are marketing to, and what their tactics and angles are. You might want to emulate them, or go a completely different route, sometimes the other direction can lead to revolutions!
3. Analyze your product(s) or service
As any good marketer would tell you, know your product. How is it used? And who would benefit or need it? You can target some of your blog posts to new markets by explaining the value of your product to them. A social media app company, for example, may find new opportunities to enter the real estate marketing field and serve real estate agents, or photography studios. Or a CRM that was built for solar energy, easily translated to another trade/service.
4. List out demographics and psychographics of your target
Take your current customer base, your competitors’ customer base, or potential customers, and list out that target customer’s likes/dislikes, demographics and psychographics.
Examples of these include:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Income level
- Education level
- Marital or family status
- Occupation
- Ethnic background
List out psychographics such as:
- Personality
- Attitudes
- Values
- Interests/hobbies
- Lifestyles
- Behavior
You can take this one step further, and really get to know your market by creating a persona or two for particular blog themes you are writing. Such as an analytical, logical, or super emotionally expressive. This can create a much more intimate connection between your product blog and your consumer.
5. Define your market channels
Once you have a comprehensive listing of your market, and who they are, define your market in channels. This will help when coming up with themes for your blog. For example, a business that sells art supplies to retailers might segment their market by geography, types of businesses or even how they sell to their consumers (online or offline).
