Are you looking for the best practices on choosing a target audience for your blog?
Choosing a target audience allows you to create better content that resonates with your users. This helps you get more conversions and sales.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily choose the target audience for your blog with examples.
Here is a quick overview of the topics we’ll cover in this article.
- What is a Target Audience?
- Why Choosing a Target Audience is Important
- Types of Target Audience for Your Blog or Business
- Finding Your Target Audience Using Google Analytics
- Viewing Google Analytics Reports for Your Target Audience
- Building Customer Personas for Your Target Audience
- Creating Content for Your Target Audience
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people that a business wants to reach with its products, services, or content.
This group of people would have similar interests, needs, demographics, or other characteristics that make them more likely to be interested in what your business has to offer.
Whether you are starting a blog or an online business, choosing a target audience helps you create effective messaging that really connects with that intended audience.
For instance, a blog about tennis or football may want to reach out to an audience interested in that particular sport, rather than sports content in general.
Similarly, an online store selling pet toys may want to target people who have pets and live around the areas where the store can easily ship products.
Why Choosing a Target Audience is Important
Choosing a target audience is important for a blog or online business because it helps them create content and products tailored to that particular group of people.
This means that the content and products will be more valuable and relevant to the audience which can lead to more user engagement, higher conversions, and increased sales.
Another benefit of choosing the right target audience is that it allows you to plan a more consistent and focused marketing strategy.
By understanding the interests, age, gender, and location, you can reach the right audience by creating organic content or running paid ads on Google or Facebook.
Not choosing a target audience has some significant disadvantages as well.
For instance, you may end up creating content that does not fit any specific customer persona and doesn’t motivate users to spend more time on your blog or WordPress website.
You may also end up wasting time and resources acquiring leads and customers who may not find your content or products relevant to their needs.
That being said, let’s understand what some common types of target audiences are and how you would go about finding the right target audience for your blog or online business.
Types of Target Audience for Your Blog or Business
Marketers categorize their target audience based on their intent, interests, location, and other information.
Following are a few examples of different types of target audiences:
1. Buying Intent Audience
This type of target audience is looking to make a purchase.
For example, let’s say you run an eCommerce store selling gym equipment. You may want to target an audience more interested in buying equipment.
To do that, you will need to create content like a sales funnel to drive customers toward making a purchase.
2. Information / Educational Audience
This type of target audience is looking for information about specific topics.
For instance, they may need information about workout plans, healthy food recipes, fitness advice, and more.
To target this audience, you’ll need to create content that provides this informational and educational value.
Now as you can see, you can still have an eCommerce store selling gym equipment, yet you have two different types of target audiences that you can create content for.
3. Demographic Target Audience
This type of target audience is selected based on their demographic information, such as age, gender, location, occupation, income group, and more.
For instance, you may have certain products women are more interested in. Similarly, you may want to reach people in specific locations where you can ship products.
Now let’s say you want to run Google or Facebook Ads. You can target these specific demographics to make your ads more effective.
To summarize:
- Target audience types can be segmented based on their intents, challenges, and segments.
- A business can have multiple target audiences with different intents.
- Each target audience can be further divided into narrower segments to make your campaigns even more effective.
Finding Your Target Audience
Most blog and business owners already have some very basic idea of who their target audience is.
For instance, if you run a travel blog, then you may already have some idea of your target audience and what their interests are.
However, often it is just guesswork and may not be enough to get you the desired user engagement and customer acquisition that you seek.
Finding Your Target Audience Using Google Analytics
Smart marketers rely on actual marketing data to choose their target audience and learn more about them.
The biggest source of this data is Google Analytics.
It is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to see where your website visitors are coming from, what they look at, where they are located, and more.
You can also use it to collect demographic data, which allows you to see your audience’s age, gender, and interests as well.
Setting Up Google Analytics for Audience Insights
The easiest way to set up Google Analytics on your blog is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and allows you to easily set up Google Analytics for your WordPress blog.
First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Note: There is also a free version of the plugin called MonsterInsights Lite that you can try. However, we recommend upgrading to the pro version to take full advantage of the plugin.
Once you have activated the plugin, visit the Insights » Settings page in your WordPress admin area and then click on the Connect MonsterInsights button.
After that, you can follow the on-screen instructions to connect Google Analytics to your WordPress website.
To learn more, see our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, which has detailed step-by-step instructions.
Once you have connected to Google Analytics. You’ll need to turn on demographics data in your Google Analytics account settings.
Simply log in to your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin gear in the lower corner.
Next, under the property column, click on Data Settings » Data Collection menu.
This will slide open the Data Collection page. From here, you need to turn on the ‘Google signals data collection’ option.
Google Analytics will now start collecting demographic data for your website visitors.
To view this report on your WordPress website, switch back to your WordPress admin area and go to the Insights » Settings page.
From here, you need to click on the Engagement tab and turn on the checkbox next to the ‘Enable Demographics and Interests Reports for Remarketing and Advertising’ option.
Don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.
Viewing Google Analytics Reports for Your Target Audience
Now that you have set up Google Analytics and turned on demographics data, you’ll need to wait for Google Analytics to collect some data.
After a while, you can visit the Insights » Reports page. Under the overview tab, you’ll see the overall traffic performance of your website.
You can also see new vs returning users and a device breakdown chart.
The device breakdown chart will show you what kind of device your users are using Desktop, tablet, or mobile.
You’ll also find the top countries your visitors are coming from and your top posts and pages.
Next, you need to switch to the Publisher tab and scroll down a little. From here, you’ll see Age and Gender charts.
The chart will show you a breakdown of users by age and gender.
Note: It is normal to have a large chunk of users marked as unknown. Google only collects data from users who are logged in and have opted in for ad personalization.
Below that, you’ll find the Interests report. This data is collected by Google Signals to help marketers target the right audience. It also helps publishers see the interests of their current website audience.
This gives you an idea of what topics interest your target audience the most.
You can further drill down these reports inside the Google Analytics dashboard. Simply go to the Demographics » Demographic details report under your Google Analytics account.
From here you can narrow down your audience by country and city. You can also see more detailed reports of interests, age, and gender breakdowns.
All of this data gives you a much clearer image of your website’s current audience and from here you can choose the target audience that you want to focus on.
Building Customer Personas for Your Target Audience
Building ‘Customer Personas’, also known as buyer personas, is a marketing exercise that helps you better understand your target audience.
These customer profiles use the target audience based on the data you have collected in the earlier step.
A good customer persona focuses on the following key elements.
- Goals – What the user wants to achieve?
- Pain points – What are the hurdles and challenges they face in achieving those goals?
- Values and motivations – What drives them to achieve their goals? For instance, it could be personal, professional, or business growth, faith, beliefs, lifestyle, or more.
- Solutions – How your product, services, or content can help them?
There are many ways to generate customer profiles using surveys, customer feedback, and other data sources.
You can also use customer persona generators to fill in the data.
Perhaps the best way to create a target audience profile is by collecting user data directly on your website. You can do so by running surveys, polls, Net Promoter score surveys, feedback forms, and more.
WPForms is the best WordPress form builder on the market that allows you to create all types of survey and feedback forms for your website.
It comes with built-in templates to quickly create forms and surveys.
Plus, you can save form data, export it, and use it in other third-party apps to better understand your website audience.
2. Customer Avatar Cheat Sheet by Digital Marketers
This downloadable cheat sheet helps you fill in a template to generate a customer avatar for your target audiences.
You can provide a name to each customer persona and fill in their average age, gender, and location based on the demographics data you collected using Google Analytics.
After that, you will need to answer the four main sections about their goals, challenges, objections, and sources of information.
The purpose of the exercise is not only to give you a better understanding of each customer persona but also to help you answer and address their objections.
Make My Persona is a free tool created by HubSpot. It allows you to simply answer a few questions to generate a persona for your target audience.
You can then edit the template by manually creating your own sections and adding information to them.
Depending on your business needs, you can then segment your target audience into different categories and create different reader profiles for each segment.
Creating Content for Your Target Audience
Once you have chosen your target audience, the next step is to reach out to them with the right content.
You can now narrow down your list of content ideas to match your target audience’s goals and pain points.
For instance, your audience’s goal could be “losing weight,” and their challenge is that they cannot go to the gym.
This allows you to look for ideas around ‘working out at home’ and ‘exercising without gym equipment.’
To learn more, see our beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress blog.
Following are some essential WordPress tools that you can use to optimize your content for your target audience further.
1. All in One SEO for WordPress
Once you start writing content for your specific audience, you will realize that there is already a lot of similar content out there.
How do you beat them and make sure that your customer can find you?
This is where All in One SEO for WordPress comes in. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and allows you to optimize your content for more visibility on search engines.
It shows the TruSEO score inside the WordPress editor with practical tips to improve your content.
Plus, it comes with a built-in headline analyzer tool to help you write catchy headlines to improve your organic click-through rate.
AIOSEO also includes integration with ChatGPT AI to generate your SEO title and meta descriptions.
Other notable features include powerful XML sitemaps, schema markup, focus keyphrases, and free Semrush integration.
To learn more, see our tutorial on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress.
Bringing your target audience to your website is only the first part of the customer journey. Next, you need to convince them to make a purchase or sign up.
Research shows that more than 70% of people visiting your website will leave in merely a few seconds without making a purchase.
Luckily, there are tools like OptinMonster. It is the best conversion optimization software on the market. It allows you to easily convert your target audience into paying customers and subscribers.
It allows you to use intuitive marketing tools like lightbox popups, countdown timers, header and footer banners, and more to convert users.
With its powerful targeting features, you can show personalized messages to users at a precise time for maximum impact.
Now let’s say you want to run an ad campaign for upcoming holidays. This campaign targets a specific segment of your target audience.
However, sending them directly to your homepage doesn’t show them the most relevant and effective content.
This is where SeedProd can help. It is the best WordPress page builder plugin on the market and allows you to create beautiful landing pages for your website quickly.
It uses an intuitive drag-and-drop design tool and comes with dozens of templates that are optimized for sales and conversions.
It comes with support for WooCommerce and dozens of ready-made templates to easily create any kind of page you need.
For details, see our guide on creating landing pages in WordPress.
As a marketer, your goal is to open a communication channel with your users before they leave your website.
There are a bunch of tools you can use to achieve this. This includes social media marketing, email marketing, paid search campaigns, or push notifications.
Push notifications are custom messages with links that you can send as notifications to users’ web browsers.
PushEngage is the best push notification software on the market. It enables you to send push notifications to your users regardless of which device they are using (mobile or desktop).
It comes with powerful targeting features that allow you to send personalized messages to your users. Plus, you can automatically segment your target audience for more effective messaging.
For more details, see our tutorial on how to add web push notifications to your WordPress site.
We hope this article helped you learn how to choose a target audience for blogs. You may also want to see our complete WordPress SEO guide or take a look at our tutorial on how to get more traffic to your website.
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The post How to Choose a Target Audience for Blogs (+ Examples) first appeared on WPBeginner.
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