One of the factors behind achieving success in the online word requires a better understanding of your digital audience. This post reviews some of the ways an organization can better understand its audience and as a result improve its digital offerings and digital platforms to deliver its offerings.
Use Analytics Tools
One of the most common ways to understand your audience is to heavily employ the use of analytics tools. These tools can provide you a thorough analysis of the audience that is visiting and interacting with your digital assets. Using these tools you can get to know the following:
- who is visiting your sites (gender, age groups, etc.) – demographics
- psychographics (attitudes and opinions)
- locations where your visitors are coming from
- their interest in your products and services (bounce rate)
- Channels that bring them to your websites and other digital assets
- and so on
However, these tools may not give you enough information about the audience that is not visiting your websites. You can look at the data related to referrals (sites that directly or indirectly refer to you) and use that information to see where your audience may be hanging out. You can then use the limited information about those sites to get to know a little more about where your audience may be found. You can also use this information to drive your marketing decisions. For example, if you find that most of your conversions are from audiences that come through referrals than search engines, you can invest your advertising dollars on those sites rather than on PPC efforts.
When trying to analyse an audience’s digital behavior, it’s important to give proper attribution to sites that drives traffic to your website. For example, just because your conversions show visitors coming to your website from search engines may not give you the complete picture. It may be that visitors learned about your products and services elsewhere but then used the search engine simply to locate your website information. In this case, therefore, search engines only had a little role to influence your audience’s decision to visit your website.
There are various data you can use to give you deeper insights into your audience. For example, if you running an e-commerce site, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- the amount of research your audience does online before heading to the shopping cart
- what activities do your users engage in before adding items to the shopping carts
- What types of users are driving more sales
- What’s the cart abandonment percentage?
- Are your users prone to do more research on your website before they are making a buy decision?
- Are visitors using your site for research buy buying elsewhere? (some sites provide enough information on their websites to help their users make a decision but then their conversion process isn’t optimized)
- and so on
Performing this types of audience analysis can give you better insights into your audience’s digital behavior and can help you design your systems and business accordingly. Some of what we have found include the following tips:
- You should also ensure that data related to search engines is used in the right context (e.g. it may not be just some magic keywords that are helping you in getting sales).
- Don’t rely on first level of data analysis that includes demographics and psychographics information. Deeper analysis is needed to unearth detailed user behavior.
Conduct Market Research
Market research can hep you identify trends related to your potential audiences.
Engage in Social listening
You can use a number of social listening tools to analyse conversations related to your brand.