Your Audience - Your Online Customers

It may surprise some people but targeting niches and knowing your audience is just as important online as it is offline. It affects everything from the way your website looks, the online voice of your organisation to customer service and interaction. It would be a mistake to have a website built for you and start a search engine optimisation campaign without knowing the essentials first.

Knowing the essentials before proceeding with your Internet marketing strategy will save you money in the future. Many businesses are advised by search engine marketing companies to make appropriate website changes to suit the needs of their online audience. By having a close perspective of who your audience are from the very beginning, you are eliminating future costs with readjusting your strategy to meet essential audience expectations you should have been aware of from the very start.
Where Are My Audience?

Researching your targeted audience online is more difficult than it is to do offline where you've got traditional market research techniques. The information you have on your offline audience is very different to that on your online audience. For example, offline, you can ask someone what their income is and based on their response see whether they are likely to become your customers or not. Online, however, all you have access to is statistical data: IP address, referrer, operating system, geographical data etc. You don't usually have the chance to ask someone what they are looking for unless you are conducting an online survey.

The place where to start looking are websites in your industry. Bear in mind that the people who provide the industry with information may not necessarily be the audience you wish to target. Individual online users are hard to find but there may be communities, associations, discussion lists and newsgroups in your industry that are an excellent starting point in your research.
Audience Research Essentials

There are two things the research must tell you:

1. General online user behaviour on the web
2. Particular online behaviour of targeted online audience

The first of the two is quite difficult to get to know well. There are significant differences between the online and offline medium and only a good knowledge of the web can guarantee accurate conclusions. That's why 'geeks' know so much about online users, because they're glued to their computer screen (only joking ;)).

If you have the time and patience there are many useful web resources on demographic statistics, user behaviour and psychology, how people assess the credibility of websites, usability, accessibility etc. There is a wealth of information to be explored that can help you set your goals and objectives in accordance to the expectations of your online audience.

What you must also get to know is the online audience you wish to target. You may want to target young people, for example, but you have to narrow the segment down to the context of your own industry.

Your users may ask themselves different questions to those seeking cars, for example. The time they take to decide whether to purchase your product or not may be different to other products. The need to build trust before leading the customer to the shopping cart is an important factor if you sell high value products or services. There are more factors than you can count which can and will affect your website.

Information on online users is gold to search engine marketing and Internet marketing specialists in general. You can find it in books, on web sites, in website logs, online surveys, on discussions lists, on newsgroups etc. You have to mine deep for it in order to grasp a good understanding of how users think, how to best target them and how to make a healthy profit from doing so.

Without a doubt, Internet marketing companies have the edge when it comes to online research. Knowing online audiences is their specialty but that doesn't exclude you from investigating how your users behave online. The only drawback is the fact that it takes an awful lot of time to get to understand them, and joking aside, you will end up glued to the screen for many days and nights in the process.

An alternative is to hire a search engine marketing company to produce a complete industry report that covers everything from audience, competitors, threats and opportunities to ideas on how to make most of the available marketing intelligence in order to increase ROI. Such a report will be costly to produce but it can give you an unrivalled insight into your industry.