To Expand Your Reach and Influence
Writers wear many hats. If you talk to anyone who writes for a living—whether it be copywriting, blogging, or social media gurus, they’ll tell you that writing is only a portion of the job.
Before you write anything, you have to understand who you’re writing for. In a nutshell: you have to research your target audience.
Your targeted audience is: a group of readers that you want to appeal to—taking their needs, wants, and interests into account. Although the definition is simplistic, audiences are anything but simple.
Like all of us, they have sub-categories that help writers identify their key characteristics. Before deciding which topics to write about, it’s a great idea to understand the different categories your target audience represents.
Target Audience Types
1. Demographics
This includes factors such as: age group, socioeconomic status, education level, marital status, race, employment, and geographic location.
An example: By analyzing demographics, you found that your target readers are women between the ages of 25 and 35 who have completed a higher education degree. Eighty percent of readers reside in urban environments while seventy-five percent are self-employed.
2. Psychographics
These are the values, interests, and beliefs that your audience holds. Some examples of this could include: daily habits, beliefs about current climate trends, and opinions about social causes. Experts have found, 21% of purchasers follow social media accounts that align with their personal beliefs.
So, whether you’re copywriting or assisting with a marketing campaign—be sure to include and support your target audience’s values.
3. Intentions to Purchase Products and Services
Although this is more of a marketing factor, as a writer (whose job might be to convert new customers on a company’s blog)—you should definitely understand your audience’s intent to buy service offerings.
Understanding readers’ goals will help in creating effective call to actions and content.
Different Types of Purchasing Intent:
- Informational: readers are simply searching for content to understand how to do something. They aren’t ready to purchase products or services at this stage. Experts suggest, although these readers aren’t interested in sales pitches, offering free downloads (such as e-books) will generate new leads.
- Navigational: prospective or current customers are aware of the content or brand they are searching for. An example of this would involve a reader searching TechRadar for articles about cloud computing.
- Commercial: readers and customers are actively searching for a specific product or service to purchase. For example, a consumer might be comparing different moisturizers across various websites. These customers should be persuaded with effective copy to encourage conversions.
- Transactional: a consumer or reader is ready to purchase a product. Website copy should be geared toward these audiences by using pitchy call to actions. An example of this could be: “buy now and get ten percent off your next order”.
4. Interests
Your audiences’ interests are essentially one of the most important things to consider. After all, these are the topics, ideas, and content that readers are searching for.
An example of this could be the target audience for a vitamin brand which would include males between the ages of 30 and 40 who are interested in improving personal health.
5. Subcultures
Subcultures include readers and consumers who share similar lifestyle beliefs, opinions, and lifestyles. Examples of this could include: audiences that purchase sustainable fashion, listen to jazz music, or eat the carnivore diet.
Understanding these specific interests will help in reaching these audience types and composing relatable content.
How to Find Your Target Audience
Now that you’re aware of the different types of audiences, it’s a good idea to understand how to find these people who will be interested in your content.
Two words: market research.
If you’re writing copy for a new brand or blogging on your own platform, you might be unsure who exactly your readers are. If you’re tasked with analyzing this data, you should first choose software or social media platforms to gather user data.
- Software: To write relevant articles and appeal to target audiences, I strongly suggest using Google Analytics. The software is free to use and gives you insight into your audiences’ age, gender, and location. You also have access to other analytics such as: sources of user traffic, session durations, bounce rates, and page views.
- Social Media Platforms: If you already have readers and you’d like insight into what their other interests are, hashtag and keyword research are your tools.
- Surveys: Simply asking your audience what they’re into will provide a vast amount of data to use while composing content. Surveys can be distributed on platforms such as your respective social media channel and sent as newsletters.
Measuring the Success of Writing Content for Target Audience
After you’ve identified and written for your target audience, you must measure the metrics (performance) of the content. Simply put, did readers enjoy the copy? Did they engage? To analyze this data these are the key performance indicators to track:
1. Traffic and Engagement
Taking note of how many of your potential or prospective readers visited your social media platforms or website is important. Not only that, but measuring whether your target audience liked, comment, and shared content gives you insight into whether they were engaged.
2. Bounce Rate
If you have great SEO, attracting targeted audiences should be easy. But keeping those readers on your website is what’s important. Measuring your bounce rate lets you know how long audiences are on specific pages of your website—and encourages you to edit content when necessary.
3. Generated Leads
If one of your goals is to convert readers to subscribers—you are essentially generating leads. You should measure how many people are signing up for your newsletters or other forms of email marketing to ensure that content is informative and influential to your target audience. Similarly, current subscribers should not be forgotten, and content should still be appealing to these readers.
4. Conversions
Conversions are the result of effective call to actions. That is, they measure whether your audience has performed a desired action. For example, if you run a blog and you want to measure how many subscribers entered their email addresses to sign up and receive your monthly newsletter, this would be a conversion.
It’s a smart idea to use software, such as Google Analytics, to measure this key performance indicator.
Takeaway:
Identifying and writing content for your targeted audience involves patience and a willingness to learn. But with my advice and your hard work you will create influential content that reaches your targeted audience and beyond.