According to Neil Patel “Defining your target audience is the first and most essential step towards success for any company or business, especially if you are just getting started”.
Audience knowledge is important because it helps you relate with the audience, and inspires cross-pollination of ideas. Also, you get to know their pain points and aspirations, and you can accurately characterize their persona. Eventually, you can even correctly locate them online, and on social media.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. Quite simply said, the target audience for your blog is the set of visitors who will benefit the most from it.
And are they will most likely form a relationship with it.
So,the biggest accomplishment of your blog is the development of a strong following among readers.
In fact, it is documented that it costs significantly more to acquire new consumers than it does to retain existing customers. This is particularly important when you want to monetize your affiliate marketing blog quickly.
What does that imply for you?
It implies that if you want to keep getting shared and promoted before new readers, you need a loyal following of readers.
Table of Contents
What Are The Benefits Of Knowing Your Target Audience?
Need For Relatability
Essentially, knowing who you’re writing for, will help you write posts that those people will relate with, and find valuable.
As a content creator, you yourself need a reference point too.
And so, one reference point could be your “expertise or passion” for a subject.
But that reference point has an inherent limitation. You could end up writing solely for yourself,and not for the audience.
But that’s a big no-no.
So let’s see the alternative.
Building A Target Audience
Instead of making a topic-expertise your reference, it’s much better when you make your reader(target audience) the reference point.
Then you’ll find yourself writing for the individual, who will actually read your content. But that’s only possible when you define a target audience.
So now your reference point for your blog becomes that individual for whom you’re writing.
This may not seem self-evident. But if you take a closer look at any blog you’ll notice that it isn’t about marketing exclusively. Rather, it’s much more about credibility through relationships.
In fact, experienced bloggers go the extra mile to develop a “target audience persona”.
Now, what’s that?
A target audience persona portrays a typical target audience member.
They’re imaginary personalities based on behavioral data and information gathered by knowing your followers on an individual basis.
The fact is that the audience persona is an individual.
This means that, like all individuals, they are more concerned about issues and beliefs. And so they need to be respected that way.
Inspiration And Cross Pollination of Ideas
A lot of bloggers pick a topic and get carried away with showing off their expertise in that area, rather than first defining a target audience.
Budding bloggers are also distracted with ‘showing off’ their expertise to their competitors.
Instead, the smart thing I learned after making this mistake myself, is that it’s better to write for a specific audience persona.
Once you do that, you’re no longer bound by any outdated topic. You’re not locked into rivalry and show off.
Rather you have the freedom to cross-pollinate concepts and combine ideas from a range of subject areas. And you can adapt them to solve problems of real concern to your target audience.
This way, there’s an evident freshness in your approach to things, compared with your competitors.
But usually…
Most bloggers are over preoccupied with their “expertise” than with their audience. And so many of them are distracted away from their readers and suffer from a disconnect.
Finally, because of this disconnect, the audience also slowly wanders off their blog.
However, when you have an individual persona in mind your content is much more inspired.
Besides, you’re not restricted to one subject line only.
Granular Experience Of Knowing Your Audience
Once you know who your audience is, you’ll benefit them and yourself in several ways.
1.You’ll understand the demographics of your audience, and know them as real individuals with actual concerns rather than abstract figures.
2.You largely understand their pain points and aspirations.
3.You also know a unique perspective to adopt, while creating your content
4.You also know exactly where to find your audience persona online.
5.On social media also know how to build your pins, share your posts, and even what headline you would craft.
6.Since your audience is not an abstract concept to you, you’re less likely to ramble on in your posts, in an attempt to impress everyone.
7. You’ll end up writing more meaningful posts, of value to the reader.
8. Your target reader is more likely to read and share your meaningful posts. And so as time passes, you will gradually find yourself gaining more blog followers.
All of these advantages are possible because you took the time to learn about your target reader.
How to Figure Out Who Your Target Reader Is
Identifying your target audience is easy once you’re clear on these two aspects
(1) For whom are you writing?
(2)What are the pain points that you’re solving?
Make a list of the following characteristics of your target reader to help you figure out who you are writing for:
1.Their gender and age
2.Where they hole up: city, state, urban, rural, international, etc.
3.Their line of work
4.How much money they earn.
5.Their marital status and whether or not they’re parents.
6.What they enjoy doing in their free time.
7.What social media platforms do they use.
8.How much time do they spend each day online? How frequently should you post your blogs for them?
9.On the internet, where they hang together.
10.Then what problem are you attempting to solve for them?
Having carved out a structure for identifying your audience persona, you need to locate them on the internet.
Where to Look for Your Target Audience
You’ll want to write about their specific concerns now that you’ve identified your target reader.
Here are some suggestions based on your niche: