Target Market Analysis: The New Religion

Target Market Analysis – The New Religion

Although we’d like to think that if we pray hard enough we’ll have great success with our websites, God isn’t going to find and appeal to our target market. Once we realize that, where do we go from there? How do we identify our target market and what do we do once we have? When you begin this quest for knowledge you might feel somewhat overwhelmed due to the amount of information out there, but there are good, solid ways to identify your target market, and there are many things that are a genuine waste of time and money.

The first step to identifying your target market is to establish the goal you intend your website to accomplish. It’s not enough to think if “you build it, they will come”. Who are “they”? Who are you trying to sell to and what are you trying to sell them? Once you have this identified you can begin researching the people you’re aiming to draw into your site.

Spending time to learn the demographics of your target market is qualitative research that will improve your conversion rates (the amount of people that complete the goal you’ve established for your site), and help you appeal specifically to the audience you’re aiming at. Understanding their age group, their lifestyle, and their backgrounds will help you specialize and “speak” directly to them rather than spending time and money on formality that will turn them off. Rule number one: KNOW your target market’s demographic.

The second important rule is to find out where your target market spends their online time. People want engaging content and if you aren’t aware of where they spend their time, you won’t be reaching them with your efforts. Remember, you have to draw them to your site; they won’t be driven there if you don’t have anything interesting they want to hear about. Look at the various social media platforms they spend time on, and the activities they participate in. Again there’s an investment of time and possibly money for appropriate market research, but if it leads your target market to your site to accomplish your goals, isn’t it worth it?

It boils down to qualitative research. Identifying what your target market needs and exactly how you can give it to them. Once you have the results, you can design your website to pull those exact people to you and have them either buy from you, or complete whatever goals you’ve established for them. Knowing who they are and how they spend their time on the Internet will allow you to provide rich content and apply SEO (search engine optimization) skills so your site will rise to the top of the demographic and attract your client base.

It’s essential to spend time and money identifying the group you should be selling to and then to optimize your site to best suit them.