Above All Things: Know Your Audience

Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash.

We’ve been reading and discussing (as we always do) material on best practices in our field—which is the creation of expert online content for websites.

That’s a pretty narrow focus, so we also wander across many related and relevant areas including search algorithm changes, web site design, and so on. We don’t do work in most of those other fields (at least not on a regular basis) but keeping up helps us understand what’s going on across the industry. Knowing what others are doing and why, and toward what ends, helps us to do a better job with the things that we do.

Reading about “bests” brings us into contact with a fair amount of articles that discuss “worsts.” One point that we find interesting about these pieces is that they operate at different levels. For instance, some analyze the problem from a very high level—for example, the overall range of content on an entire website. Others are extremely focused—the quantity and amount of repetition of key words, for instance. Still others look at the problem in exactly the way we do—at the level of individual articles (posts or pages) and collections of articles.

We’re taking this opportunity to look into this a little: not necessarily at “the worst” of something, but rather at some of the mistakes that happen most often in web content. We might write several posts looking at different parts of this larger issue.

One of the items that comes up on many lists of “content mistakes” is the problem of not understanding the audience that the content is intended for. This is such a basic point that we’ve decided to start with it.

Audience, as a concept, is one of the most basic elements that makes up all writing. In any class that touches on rhetoric, including something as foundational as an introductory writing class for college freshmen, this should be covered. Who are you writing this piece for? Who is going to read it? Who is the audience?

It’s ill-advised to invest much effort in a piece of writing if the author doesn’t already know the answer. That’s true for a freshman essay, but just as true for a newspaper article, a magazine feature, or a novel. And, of course, it’s also true for your website content.

How important is it? Very. In fact, you shouldn’t be publishing any content unless you have a firm understanding of the audience it’s targeted at.

Can you answer that question—who is the audience?

Having goals for your site should help you understand who it’s aimed at. Is the site meant to do nothing more than give your business a presence online? That’s a necessary precondition, but it’s overlooking a great deal of potential. Is it meant to act as a first step for potential customers who find you through online searches? That’s another good starting point—but it’s only a starting point. Chances are that you already have some kind of demographic data on your customers: at the very least, you know their geographic distribution and probably something about their income; depending on your type of business and the effort you’ve put in, you might also have data on age, gender, family size, educational background and all sorts of other important factors. Some of this will matter, but some of it will not.

The answer to “Who is the audience?” might not even be as simple as understanding one class of user that interacts with your site. Your business site might have several distinct sections, each designed to most effectively reach a specific type of audience: customers, partners, or investors for instance. We’ve worked with several clients with sites designed in this way—and sometimes the goals of those sections are so different that the content is produced by different teams. We’ve also worked with several clients who host multiple websites, each designed to attract traffic from a particular customer demographic. Folks like that know exactly who they’re trying to reach (but this approach is not for everyone).

Most businesses already know who their audience is—at least in a general sense. Some of them have a very good handle on their average customer, while others are satisfied with having a more intuitive sense of who their customers are. Different approaches can work (although in today’s economy it’s harder to justify a seat-of-the-pants strategy over a data-driven one).

Waltham WordWorks can hit the ground running with content generation for you when you already know your audience. But we can also help you understand how to target your content when you’re not sure where your focus should be. We can help you identify your audience and then create content that is effective for them. Get in touch with us to start using the strengths you already have.

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In future posts, we’ll return to some of the other concerns or “mistakes” that can happen with online content. Click the “follow” button just below the search box to receive notifications of those future posts—we don’t collect or share your information, it’s for this purpose only.