In online marketing you will often hear the question, “Who is your customer?”
In blogging the question is, “Who is your reader?”
Do you know the answer? Do you have a vague idea of who your audience is? The types of people it’s made up of, their ages, education or income level?
And WHY might you need to know this?
First, let’s start with HOW you get the information about your audience in the first place.
Go to www.alexa.com and type in your URL in the top and click on “GO”. Next, select the “Get Details” box.
If you will scroll down you will see “Audience Demographics.” There you will learn the gender of your site visitors, if your site visitors are college educated, and where they most often check in to your site. And if you scroll down a bit further you can also see in which countries your visitors live.
Now let’s look at Facebook. If your business has a Facebook page, and it should, you can click on “See All” under insights, then click on “People”. Here you can find out about Age & Gender, Geography & Language – right down to the city where most of your fans come from and the language they speak.
You can also get more information about your readers from Google Analytics as well as a few WordPress plug-ins for your wordpress blog.
The information won’t be exactly the same across the board because each program measures data a little differently, but you’ll be able to put together a picture of who your reader or customer is.
Now, how do you get a good idea of who your audience is? Well, this can be kind of fun. Drag out a bunch of fashion, home and lifestyle magazines and a few pieces of poster board or heavy weight card stock.
Cut out images of people who fit the descriptors in the data you’ve collected.
College education, income level, location and language are given to you in the data you collected but also think about what your audience members do on Saturday morning? Where do you think they shop? What kinds of things interest them? How do they spend their leisure time?
Now, you will have to go on intuition for some of this but also look at your website, Facebook or blog comments, as well as email messages or etsy store feedback. If you are able to look at the profiles of some of your customers go see what else they purchased or where they hung out with their family last weekend.
It’s not stalking… it’s research.
Find out all you can about your audience and create 2-4 profiles based on what you have found. Collect images and paste them to your cardstock or poster board. Get as detailed as you can and name the people or the profiles if you want.
Now for the WHY.
The next time you are wondering what to carry in your shop, what to create for the craft fair or what to post about on your blog take a look at the profiles you created. What do THOSE people want to see or read? Would they buy the new scarf you are thinking of making and where would they wear it?
Any and all information you can gather about the people who like what you say, write or make will help you make good decisions in your creative business.
Go ahead. Give it a try!
Do you have customer or reader profiles? Have they helped you when you were unsure about a business decision?
By Vicki O’Dell, The Creative Goddess
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