Understanding Audience
In Short
- What you are selling?
- To whom you are selling it?
Content can only go so far on its own. To really make an impact, you have to appeal to your audience. Veterans of writing, advertising, and marketing are well aware of their audience and how to best appeal to it. This guide is for the rest of us.
What's an Audience?
An audience is the group of users your website is appealing to and wanting to attract.
While some sites appeal to a single audience, many appeal to several. For example, the website selling nothing but owl-themed earrings will most likely be appealing to a particular age group and economic level of women. However, a website selling educational K-12 products will need to appeal to many different types of teachers, schools, and geographic regions.
How to Determine Audience
Determining your audience is as simple as answering the following questions:
- What am I selling?
- To whom am I selling it?
What About Bob?
Bob's business plan—selling all sorts of boxes—has several categories of audiences.
What is Bob selling?
- Boxes: Bob has suppliers all over the world that he buys from.
- Storage, Moving, Novelty, Lunch, etc.
- Custom Boxes: Bob has resources that can create large or small orders of custom boxes in any shape or pattern
- Custom shapes, sizes, patterns, materials, etc.
To whom is Bob selling?
- Americans & Canadians
- Language support for English, Spanish, and French
- Varying Age Groups
- Universal
- Space-saving
- Matching sets
- Moving boxes
- Kids & Teenagers
- Novelty/character boxes
- Lunch boxes
- Kids jewelry boxes
- College Age
- Dorm- and apartment-friendly storage
- Footlockers and other locking boxes
- Parents
- Baby themes
- Kids, Teenager, College Age boxes (see above)
- Adult boxes (see below)
- Adults
- Safes and gun safes
- Large jewelry boxes
- Long-term storage boxes
- Grandparents
- Storage for downsizing
- Kids, Teenager, College Age boxes (see above)
- Adult boxes (see above)
- Universal
Bob knows that many of these demographics overlap, so he needs to appeal to both at the same time. In terms of lunchboxes, kids want a design that appeals to them while parents and grandparents are wanting to know how much it holds, if it will keep food cold, and the durability of the product.