Specify Your Target Audiences

Who do you want your business website to reach? Think about what will make your target audiences want to buy from you, and take some notes in a Word document you can refer to later.

Think about some of the ways your target audiences use the Internet and how they respond to various types of content:

• What types of websites do they like to visit every day?
• What’s the best way to communicate with your target audiences — words, audio, video, all of the above?
• Would your customers appreciate having the opportunity, right on your site, to discuss relevant topics and issues with you and others?

List Your Target Audiences

You might make a tentative list of your primary target audiences. You could start by combining some of these words, for example:

• male
• female
• urban
• suburban
• rural
• African-American
• Asian-American
• Latino / Latina
• homeowners
• new homeowners
• renters
• mothers
• fathers
• married couples
• single parents
• college students
• Lesbian / Gay / Bi / Trans
• activist / issue-oriented
• blue collar
• white collar
• low-income
• wealthy

This is not a complete list, of course, and specifying your own target audiences will almost certainly call for additional categories.

Break down any categories that describe your primary or secondary target audiences into age groups — 19-34, 35-49, 50-69, 70+, or whatever.

Then, as appropriate, combine and add words to be more specific — urban 19- to 34-year-old Latina college students, new suburban homeowners, or incarcerated politicians, for example.

To take a specific example, if you’re selling baby products, new moms and dads are a primary target audience. Secondary target audiences might include grandparents and people who go to baby showers.

Think about these audiences and make your list increasingly more specific while you're developing your Internet marketing strategies — parents of newborns, parents of toddlers, etc.

Reaching your Target Audiences with Social Media Marketing

Begin thinking about your long-term social media marketing strategies, which involve:

• understanding your audiences (who do you want to reach?)
• understanding the websites and blogs that influence them.
• developing mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships with bloggers and others who influence your target audiences

Are You a Strictly Local Business?

If you're a local business, you may need to market your site as regionally-specific, zip-code-specific, and/or income-specific. If you’re an upscale neighborhood restaurant, for example, your target audience may be “people who live reasonably close to our restaurant and can afford to pay our prices at least once or twice a month.”

If your business serves a specific part of a larger metropolitan area, try to get a complete list of communities in your area. Decide which communities you want to target, then find out exactly which of your competitors in those communities are doing well on search engine results pages. A "Service Area" page that lists the communities you serve could be a helpful part of your site.