How to define the target audience on web ?

One of the most important concern of any online initiative is how to engage the target audience. Any thought in this direction should begin with identifying and defining the target audience who are likely to be interested in the initiative and would inturn would do any business. Ask yourself these simple questions and the answers for which  would define your target audience.

Most important of these question is who would do business with you ? Try to figure out who would be interested in your products or services that you offer. Be as detailed as possible and categorise the target audience into several groups with similar charecteristics eg., beauty conscious yong women

Once you linked the nature of your products and services with the potential buyers, try to find answer to the next pertinent question - what are the charecteristics of this target audience. Try to categorise the target group interms of their age, social status, gender and your broad idea about the interests of each target group. Lets say if the product is related to personal care targetted towards young men and women, never present the information in way a pharmaceutical company would present the same information. Figure out what would appeal to the young. This should reflect not only in the presentation of information but also in the design of the site.

Now you have the target audience categorised into several groups and charecteristics of each group. These charecteristics should be translated into online functionalities. This can range from categorisation of products and services to chaing the look and feel of the site according to the group that would frequently visit the site.

Once these online functionalities are ready, it is time to figure out how these functionalities and features should be presented on the website. Logically, what would appeal most in the target audience should be highlighted most in the page. Each functionality should be treated as elements with progressively lesser importance. If there is a product or service that is unique or that needs to be given priority because of any business interest, that also should be addressed with importance while placing different elements on the web page.

There are several techniques that would prove very useful in defining target audience. Sampling of the potential customers is an important tool. Interviewing potential customers is another very useful technique. Card sorting is another technique that can be effectively used to find out what needs to be placed as most important and less important on a web page. Valuable insights will also be available if the traffic data of competitor sites can be analysed, but this is highly unlikely. Once the site went live and traffic began to trickle into the site, then also web analytics can prove very useful. Google analytics is an efficient web analytics service which can be used by the web administrator free of cost.

So it is neither the beuty nor the technology that will generate business for an online initiative. The more we know about our potential customers, the better our chances of tuning our products and services according to their requirements and hence doing  larger volume of business.

I would like to hear from you what you think about the ideas expressed here. Please feel free to drop me a scrap or email with your comments, concerns and questions and i would be more than happy to share my suggestions which you might find useful.

regards,

Shivaprasad