Defining Your Target Audience

Planning a Website Redesign

When planning a website design or website redesign, business often times think from their own perspective rather than walking in the shoes of their target audience. Having a clear definition of who your target audience is vital for any aspect of marketing and especially true for your website. When defining your website audience, you’ll want to know how they will be using your website and what they hope to get from you website.

Who Uses Your Website?

The first step is to define who your website’s users are? We can begin by detailing out some pretty basic demographics:

• Business or consumer
• Age
• Sex
• Education level
• Income level

Consumer Demographics

Then we can document more consumer related characteristics:

• Understanding of the need – which would warrant them purchasing your product or service
• Familiarity with your product or service as a option
• Have they purchased this type of product or service previously?
• Have they purchased from your business previously?

Consumer Psychographics

Lastly, we should also define their psychographics or psychology behind why they buy:

• What challenges to the users suffer from?
• Why are they motivated to buy these product or service – what are they motivated by?
• What do they fear when deciding to purchase these products or services?
• What are their expectations with not only the purchase process, but also how the product or service will perform?

Secondly, you’ll want to establish why these people are visiting your website? What are they hoping to get from your website? Do you want them to buy a product – if so, what products are more important than others? Do you want them to be educated and be able to take tangible information away from your site – such as how-to guides, case studies or white papers? Do you want the website visitors to be informed of your service offering and understand how your solution is unique and can remedy their problems?

Keep It Simple

While defining both who your target audience is and what they are hoping to accomplish when visiting your website can be a challenging process, don’t over think it. Keep it simple but do capture this information in a document or report and make sure there consent amongst the leadership team as missing the mark with defining your audience can be setting your website up for failure.